Apple fans greeted the iPhone 4S with glee and record sales after the latest iPhone was introduced Oct. 14.
But some consumers have been repaid with frustrating battery issues.
Charles Arthur at the Guardian is reporting that Apple engineers are trying to crack the case of the rapidly-draining battery on the 4S.
The problem remains a mystery. Even Siri, the new device’s hit voice-driven digital assistant, doesn’t have an answer.
Apple Insider notes: “When it was unveiled earlier this month, Apple claimed that the iPhone 4S had an increased battery talk time of eight hours. But standby battery time, when compared to the previous-generation iPhone 4, is advertised at 100 hours less.” In fact, the new device has 50 fewer standby hours than the original iPhone introduced in 2007.
Erick Schonfeld shares his personal experience with the 4S at TechCrunch: “Today, my iPhone died after about 8 hours—not even enough to get me through a full day without recharging (and this is typical). This was not 8 hours of constant use (unless you count the constant pinging of notifications, which may be the culprit). It was 8 hours total from the time I unplugged it in the morning and took it with me until the screen went black at around 4 PM.”
He adds: “Battery life is one of those things you don’t notice until you don’t have it anymore. And I’m noticing it big time.”
The Apple support communities are buzzing with theories and possible fixes.
“Glad to see people are talking about this,” iPhone owner ‘telarium’ says. “My 4S battery life is terrible… even worse than my 3GS, even though all the settings are the same.”
Apple has reached out to some owners.
One owner told the Guardian that Apple engineers asked to install a monitoring program to try to diagnose the problem.
An owner contacted by Apple told the Guardian: “My battery life was extremely poor — 10 percent 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.”
The Guardian said in some cases the short life has been blamed on corrupted contacts imported from Apple’s MobileMe or iCloud services, or from Google’s Contacts list. Deleting and reinstalling them sometimes can help.
Stay tuned. Once engineers figure this out, expect Siri to share the answers.
