iPhone 4S suffers from battery woes

Engineers at Apple Inc. are contacting owners of the new iPhone 4S in an attempt to solve problems with battery life on the, amid observations of dramatic drops in battery longevity. A report on UK’s The Guardian quoted an owner who said Apple contacted him directly and asked him to install a monitoring program on the phone to try to diagnose the problem. “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," said the owner. According to the iPhone 4S owner, he then got a call from a senior Apple engineer who said he was “reaching out" to users for data and admitted this was an issue. He said the Apple engineer than asked “lots of questions about my usage" and then asked if he could install the fix. “(The Apple engineer) was incredibly helpful and apologetic in the typical Apple way!" the iPhone 4S owner said. The Guardian noted Apple’s data sheet for the iPhone 4S “quietly" pointed out the standby time for the new phone would only be 200 hours - compared to 300 for the iPhone 4, and 250 hours even for the original 2007 iPhone. It said Apple did not offer any reason when asked, but noted that other lifespans such as 3G talktime were as long, or longer than previous models. According to The Guardian, iPhone 4S users were “surprised" by how rapidly the phone’s battery appears to drain, especially compared to the iPhone 4. But it also noted the 4S has a more powerful dual-core A5 processor, and a 5.3 watt-hours capacity, 0.05Wh more capacity than the iPhone 4. 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 then reinstalling them sometimes seems to fix the problem, the report said. The report added problem has generated huge discussions on Apple’s support boards, with some people finding that backing the phone’s contents up to their computer and then restoring it improves the life. On the other hand, the Guardian said its own tests on an unrestored iPhone 4S using Google Contacts and MobileMe suggest that the phone drains fastest when mobile data is switched on, while Wi-Fi usage makes little difference to battery consumption. Neither location services, which try to orient the phone based on Wi-Fi and mobile data information, nor the voice-driven assistant Siri, appear to affect battery drain particularly. — TJD, GMA News