# iPhone 4 Battery Life?



## pawcio (Apr 16, 2010)

So yesterday once I setup my iPhone 4, it was charged to 100%.... I used it to the max to drain the battery completely to 0%... Before it died I check the usage time and it was at around 5 hours and 20 minutes (not too bad I guess). So I charged it up overnight and started using it today and the battery is already down to 87% without using the phone that much (current usage shows 29 minutes). I havent been playing any games, just browsing the app store, checked my mail and went on a few websites. To me it seems that the battery is being drained fairly quickly. Anyone else notice the battery draining faster than they anticipated?


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## LebanonDon (Feb 13, 2008)

Check if you are running a lot of apps in the background. (double click the home button).


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## pawcio (Apr 16, 2010)

LebanonDon said:


> Check if you are running a lot of apps in the background. (double click the home button).


I close all my apps regularly. I think it's cause I set my Screen Brightness to max yesterday :lmao: ... I thought that didnt matter since I also had the "Auto-Brightness" turned on, so I thought that it would ajust it to whatever the optimal brightness should be. I changed the brigthness back to about halfway as it was by default. I'll see if this helps.


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## LebanonDon (Feb 13, 2008)

pawcio said:


> I close all my apps regularly. I think it's cause I set my Screen Brightness to max yesterday :lmao: ... I thought that didnt matter since I also had the "Auto-Brightness" turned on, so I thought that it would ajust it to whatever the optimal brightness should be. I changed the brigthness back to about halfway as it was by default. I'll see if this helps.


hahaha, that should definitely help.

it looks so good on full brightness thought :-D


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## pawcio (Apr 16, 2010)

LebanonDon said:


> hahaha, that should definitely help.
> 
> it looks so good on full brightness thought :-D


Sure does look good on full brightness! 

Anyways, that hasn't really help with my battery problem... since my previous post an hour ago, battery has now dropped to about 60% (from 87%) and I maybe used the phone for 5 minutes in that hour...and Usage is shown as 1 hour and 31 minutes (just an hour ago it was at like 29 minutes usage and as I said, I only used the phone for like 5 minutes over the last hour!)...Also note that the phone was pretty warm even though I wasnt using it!)... I found a blog post about some guy that has similar problem as me Why Is The Battery Life On My iPhone 4 So Bad? - Techland - TIME.com ... One of the comments was kinda interesting, it said the problem could be Gmail being setup as an exchange server account on the iPhone. This could be true because last night I did ad a gmail account as Exchange. I now deleted it and added it as a normal gmail account option from the "Add Email Account" setting. I did a couple reboots of the phone and now i'll see if this helps! I'll keep you guys posted, but if anyone else has any suggestions than let me know!


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## Ironside (Jul 24, 2010)

Hmmmmmmmm... it's been about 5 1/2 hours since I unplugged my phone. 

So far today I haven't done anything spectacular with it, checked some e-mail, internet browsed a little, looked at all my awesome pictures I took with it a few times (LOL), and showed it off to a few people at work. 

My battery is @ 96%.


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## pawcio (Apr 16, 2010)

I'm pretty sure its something to do with the email account setup. When I deleted my gmail email accounts, it appeared to get a little better battery life. I found a Apple Support article discussing some issue with Exchange email accounts. iOS 4.0: Exchange Mail, Contacts, or Calendars may not sync after update ... if this doesnt work than I'm gonna restore my iphone and set it up again as new device and see if that helps.


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## Insp Gadget (Aug 23, 2009)

Same here. Both my wife and I got our phones yesterday and noticed the battery life is terrible. Gonna watch it a bit closer today.


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## Ironside (Jul 24, 2010)

Another update, after about 2 more hours (since I last posted) I spent half an hour straight playing games on the phone and text messaging @ lunch.

Battery is down to 91% after a total of almost 7 1/2 hours so I don't think what you are experiencing is the 'norm'.

FYI: I dont use gmail on this phone (I did on my 3GS but I deleted the email from my iPhone 4 when I set it up since I mostly just get junk mail on there)

I have it hooked up to 1 hotmail account.

If this was my 3GS, by about this time of the day i'd be floundering around 60-70%... MAYBE 80% if I didn't touch the phone AT ALL.

So definitely an improvement! :clap:


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## daniels (Jul 27, 2009)

what i know is that its been lasting longer then my 4 hour mbp 2009 battery.


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## Ironside (Jul 24, 2010)

Final report from my first full day of use.

I spent a few hours gaming on the phone (LineRunners is AWESOME), used it to stream music via bluetooth, e-mailed quite a bit, sent a bunch of texts, browsed quite a bit of internet.

When I plugged my phone in before bed, I had 20% battery life left after 17 hours of use.

Pretty good.


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## iKevin (Jun 9, 2010)

To the original poster, I think I'm having the same issue as you. I went to work today, had the phone on airplane mode part of the day, did a few things here and there and my phone is at 63%... Not too happy about this.


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## LebanonDon (Feb 13, 2008)

Ironside said:


> Final report from my first full day of use.
> 
> I spent a few hours gaming on the phone (LineRunners is AWESOME), used it to stream music via bluetooth, e-mailed quite a bit, sent a bunch of texts, browsed quite a bit of internet.
> 
> ...


Wow, whats your brightness at? Do you use WiFI at all?


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## magrat22 (May 24, 2010)

This is mine so far.


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## iKevin (Jun 9, 2010)

Mine... Doesn't seem too good, does it?


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## sheamus (May 20, 2010)

When I was using push mail i was getting terrible battery life on my 3G. When I set my mm and gmail account to fetch every 30 minutes it double my battery life. Unitl iPhone gets real push this will always be the case. 

On my iPhone 4, I got only 8 hours first charge. But it is 6pm of second day of my secon charge and meter shows 50%. That is amazing I think. Mind you i am camping an limite use. 

-s


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## okcomputer (Jul 18, 2005)

Mine was terrible the first day. But I was using a lot of data and gps and such. 

Last night I unplugged it at 8pm. Here is my current status:

Actually I'm down to 56% now since writing the post (I'm using Tapatalk).


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## okcomputer (Jul 18, 2005)

Oops Tapatalk's image uploader crops by default. Here's a better image.


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## iKevin (Jun 9, 2010)

okcomputer said:


> Oops Tapatalk's image uploader crops by default. Here's a better image.


See, that seems pretty good, much better than mine... :*(


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## adagio (Aug 23, 2002)

How are you folks getting that screenshot of your battery usage?


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## okcomputer (Jul 18, 2005)

adagio said:


> How are you folks getting that screenshot of your battery usage?


Press the home button and the on/off button at the same time.


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## adagio (Aug 23, 2002)

okcomputer said:


> Press the home button and the on/off button at the same time.


thanks!


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## magrat22 (May 24, 2010)




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## Ironside (Jul 24, 2010)

LebanonDon said:


> Wow, whats your brightness at? Do you use WiFI at all?


My brightness slider is underneathe the "NE" in the word "brightness"... so a little to the right of the half-way mark (which I think was default).

I have WiFi always on, but did not have bluetooth activated that first day.

Now that i'm running bluetooth 24/7 it's SLIGHTLY worse, but still seems really good.


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## jimbotelecom (May 29, 2009)

Was in Montreal on Sunday with 3g enabled and push on my work exchange account. Woke up Monday morning with a big problem....battery was dead far too quickly. Very little use on Sunday.

I disabled push on the one work email account and problem solved - reasonable battery drain. There's a problem on the 4g 32gb with push exchange accounts. This did not happen with my 3Gs with the new OS upgrade.

I hope Apple solves this quickly this is my work account and I need it to pay the bills.

Thanks for the thread it saved a lot of searching.


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## mrhud (Oct 30, 2007)

This is mine:








This is my first iPhone, so not sure what it means really.

I suppose it's okay since I've been playing around with it quite a bit.


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## FrankJ (Aug 7, 2010)

Yeah, extending battery life can be tricky! I only Google at bGoog.com on my phone to keep my battery going as long as possible. The black background looks sweet but more importantly it uses a lot less power than white. It also uses less network data which helps keep my phone bill down.


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## tacsniper (Aug 27, 2007)

my battery life sucks too... i wonder if it just need a few charges befores it kicks into the "better" battery life.


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## iphoneottawa (Apr 21, 2010)

FrankJ said:


> Yeah, extending battery life can be tricky! I only Google at bGoog.com on my phone to keep my battery going as long as possible. The black background looks sweet but more importantly it uses a lot less power than white. It also uses less network data which helps keep my phone bill down.


Thanks for the link!


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## banned-user (Jul 31, 2010)

FrankJ said:


> Yeah, extending battery life can be tricky! I only Google at bGoog.com on my phone to keep my battery going as long as possible. The black background looks sweet but more importantly it uses a lot less power than white. It also uses less network data which helps keep my phone bill down.





iphoneottawa said:


> Thanks for the link!


I *thank-you *as well.

Great idea!


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## mrhud (Oct 30, 2007)

Can anyone please let me know if this looks normal, poor or excellent?

Basically checking email, tethering, Bluetooth on, WiFi off, made some calls, Facebooking, internet....nothing extraordinary,


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## sheamus (May 20, 2010)

Sounds like you have similar useage to me, and I just got two two days out of a charge (forgot charger at home). I still have 15% left when I plugged into charger. I took about 50 photos, and 3 videos the first day too. Probably only about half hour surfing (google-reader), and a bunch of other minor usage. Wifi on, bluetooth on.

The big thing for me is keeping mail on check every 30 minutes. When I had push mail, battery life sucked. 

Try posting the stuff you see running in task manager, and maybe someone will recognize it as a battery killer, i.e., skype.


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## mrhud (Oct 30, 2007)

Where is the Task Manager? I can't seem to find it...


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## Deathlok2001 (Jul 30, 2010)

2 days from a charge? Is that all on stand by?

I play games and stuff on the phone and it eats through the battery like nothing. I charge it twice a day! What am I doing wrong?


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## GregoriusM (Jun 7, 2008)

mrhud said:


> Where is the Task Manager? I can't seem to find it...


Click the Home button twice quickly and a row of icons will come up. These are the programs you have "running". Most of them are suspended, some are finishing off what they started when you left them, and the odd one can do processes in the background.

If you touch one and hold it, you'll get the familiar "X" in the corner, the same way you get when you want to delete and app from your phone.

If you hit the "X", you are killing the app, in effect using this as a Task Manager.

If you swipe right or left (I forget which is which - one way gets you the audio controls, the other way gets you more apps if you have more running) you can then press and hold to stop any apps that you want to stop, or just touch them to go straight to that app.

It is the Multitasking Bar, but it also serves as a Task Manager when you hold your finger on an App icon.


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## Deathlok2001 (Jul 30, 2010)

GregoriusM said:


> Click the Home button twice quickly and a row of icons will come up. These are the programs you have "running". Most of them are suspended, some are finishing off what they started when you left them, and the odd one can do processes in the background.
> 
> If you touch one and hold it, you'll get the familiar "X" in the corner, the same way you get when you want to delete and app from your phone.
> 
> ...


*So do you have to go into this multitasking bar and end every app you start? * I just found out about this and found about 50 apps open! LOL SO I held down on one of em to get the dancing icon thing and end all of these.


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## sheamus (May 20, 2010)

As someone else has said, most aren't doing anything, it is no different that iOS3, they are simply there for convenience when you are fast-switching apps. So are doing stuff, like skype listening for connections, etc. I rarely go in and close them unless I am bored. They don't seem to bother my battery life.

Don't get me wrong, if I play a bunch of games, I will chew through a battery. But in my normal use, I don't play many games. 

For me the biggest saver was putting the brightness at about 50%, turning off push mail, and everything thing else push.


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## Deathlok2001 (Jul 30, 2010)

Hey Sheamus, your not the grappler champion from WWE?


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## GregoriusM (Jun 7, 2008)

Deathlok2001 said:


> *So do you have to go into this multitasking bar and end every app you start? * I just found out about this and found about 50 apps open! LOL SO I held down on one of em to get the dancing icon thing and end all of these.


No. Only the ones you find that are doing constant background processing that are using up the battery. The rest, as was said above, are there for convenience in switching apps, by and large.

The ones you've used most recently are the ones you see first in line.

I'd basically never use the Task Manager side of it unless I knew an App or two were uses resources in the background and I wasn't going to use that app for a while.


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## amoda (Sep 23, 2005)

FrankJ said:


> Yeah, extending battery life can be tricky! I only Google at bGoog.com on my phone to keep my battery going as long as possible. The black background looks sweet but more importantly it uses a lot less power than white. It also uses less network data which helps keep my phone bill down.


"We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this"
- Google

Wall Street Journal's own investigation/

So unless you have a CRT laying somewhere there is no real benefit to a black google. Also, as far as I know, isn't website colour determined by a string of digits of mostly equal length? With black being #000000 and white being #FFFFFF?


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## chas_m (Dec 2, 2007)

Deathlok2001 said:


> 2 days from a charge? Is that all on stand by?
> 
> I play games and stuff on the phone and it eats through the battery like nothing. I charge it twice a day! What am I doing wrong?


You are playing too many games. Games work the processor and other resources HARD. Result = quick battery depletion.

I envy you your free time, but perhaps you should look at some alternate hobbies to keep the game-playing under control.


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## Deathlok2001 (Jul 30, 2010)

I found that if I shut down an app after using it, the battery life is super. So now, after I finish with each app, I go into the task manager and shut er down!


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