29 October, 2011
By Adnan
Quite a number of iPhone 4S owners have reported that they are facing battery drain issues on their new devices. While the iPhone 4S battery should be performing well and good considering the fact that its new, there seems to be a major problem with battery timing on almost all new devices. Now, Apple engineers are reaching out to iPhone 4S owners and are using their help to find a fix for this issue.
Basically what Apple engineers are doing is contacting various iPhone 4S owners and questioning them about their usage habits and the subsequent battery drain that follows after their usage. They’re allow asking permission to install a monitoring program on their devices so that relevant data could be collected. This data will help Apple engineers in developing a fix for iPhone 4S battery drain issue.
One such gentleman who was contacted by Apple engineers, revealed the whole story to the Guardian:
My battery life was extremely poor – 10% drop in standby every hour. I noticed that the usage figure was roughly half that of standby, even when the phone was not being used, so I assumed something was crashing or running in the background. I switched off all the new features including Siri and location services, but it was still really poor. I also tried setting up a clean phone with no apps but it is still really poor.
I then got a call from a senior [Apple] engineer who said he had read my post and was ‘reaching out’ to users for data and admitted this was an issue (and that they aren’t close to finding a fix!) and asked lots of questions about my usage and then asked if he could install the file below and that he would call back the day after to retrieve the info. I extracted the file from my Mac after a sync and emailed it to him. He was incredibly helpful and apologetic in the typical Apple way!
It must be kept in mind that the battery on iPhone 4S actually has 0.05 Wh more capacity than the battery on iPhone 4. However on the iPhone 4S spec sheet Apple has posted a standby time of 200 hours against the previous 300 hours standby time. No specific reason has been posted for this, though its possible that the standby time on iPhone 4S is less due to the power A5 dual-core processor, Siri, location services and a increased number of new background processes.
It looks like Apple will soon be able to find a fix for iPhone 4S battery drain issue considering the fact that they are working closely with iPhone 4S owners in a bid to resolve this issue fast.
