The iPhone 4 shrinking battery
I’ve been experiencing some battery related issues lately with my iPhone 4. I’ve gotten pretty frustrated with how crappy the battery life has been and being the good geek that I am I started investigating more into this matter. I’ve tried a number of changes on the phone to see if I can figure out exactly why my battery life has been so crappy.
When the iPhone 4 first came out I had just my one GMail account enabled using IMAP. I also had push notifications on (I don’t get that many of them during the day at work) and after learning how background processing works I closed every app that I was not using religiously. Later during the week of owning the phone I added on my corporate exchange account and noticed my battery went to crap fast. After reading the event logs on the exchange server there was a misconfiguration on it for mobile devices (we’re a blackberry shop with a BES) so I made a few changes to be made so it would stop my iPhone from getting beat down. A few changes later and the battery life was satisfactory, this change also addressed the same issue with a co-worker’s Android Evo. After the latest update my battery life started going downhill fast. It was typical for my 100% battery at 8:30am to read 75% come lunchtime with little to no usage. I’ve tried restores from backup, starting from scratch and DFU restores / from scratch with no change to my battery performance. I have a feeling this is a hardware issue so I made an appointment with the Apple Store.
So after visiting the Apple Store yesterday and having the Genius at the bar do a DFU wipe my phone he stated that I should go home and plug the iphone in and to not restore my settings on the phone from a backup. I reluctantly obliged and went home and did jsut that, started from scratch… again. I haven’t seen any improvement after doing this as show in the screenshots above.
Are my findings typical for an iPhone 4 battery? Is a new iPhone 4 the next step to solving this? How is your battery life? Leave me a comment of hit me up on twitter @jasontucker
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Can't say for sure if it's the hardware or the ios 4. I've got a 2nd generation iPod touch that was great, and then seeing the folders feature conned me into updating to ios4. Ouch. Battery doesn't last as long, most apps (third party and apple's own) run choppy, the keyboard either misses input, or after I press the key again, catches up and puts out all the key hits at once, etc. And while I was on an 8 hour drive, the music player app started crashing about 3 minutes after pressing play. Had to hook it up to the computer and resync my music library to get it to stop doing that.
In addition, it doesn't talk to my JCV car stereo like it used to.
I'm going to do the downgrade http://lifehacker.com/5572003/how-to-downgrade-yo… and that *should* get things running proper again. You have any friend's with a iPhone 3g? They will probably mirror what I'm saying as the base hardware is really similar, and I've got a co-worker with a 3g and he noticed the same.