Today battery life was terrible. But I just fixed my battery problem - other's with issues may have different problems than mine. Hopefully this will help someone else.
Earlier today (Sunday) I went from 99% at 10AM to 10% by 3PM. That's about 5 hours to drain the battery with light use! After the fix, in 2 hours of using the iPhone 5 for about 8 minutes, with 120 minutes of standby, I'm still at 100%. When I would look at Settings > General > Usage it didn't show any "usage" or "standby" time, acting like it was never fully charged (actually it was only at 99% when I woke up after 8 hours of charging). I estimate that I used it maybe 10 minutes for browsing, 30 minutes reading, 10 minutes phone calls, 5 text messages over that 5 hour period.
And I always have everything turned on with my AT&T iPhone 4S (including location, notification, WiFi) with no issues before. The 4S would only drop to 10% by 12 midnight (15 hours) with normal/moderate usage. But today I could actually watch the battery gauge drop 10-25% per hour, depending on whether I left the phone alone or used it a little. And the phone was running hot very often. I tried to reboot it a couple of times, and turned it off and back on several times but that didn't help and it kept running hot. The Apple store had no appointments till the next day, and the person keeping the Geniuses on schedule suggested removing all my apps or turning off location services to see if there was a conflict there with an older non-iOS 6 app.
I tried think of anything that could have made things go wrong. I had set up my iPhone 5 Friday night, and had sync'd my backup onto the new phone. At first I thought everything was there when it stopped loading stuff back onto my phone (apps, music, movies). But apparently it had never finished the "restore backup" process. Everything looked like it was done, including iTunes showing only 5GB of free memory on the phone. But each time I made a change to my app selections or playlists, the next sync would copy over extra files that should have already been on the phone from my backup. All day Saturday the battery life was fine, before I did my last sync when I went to bed. That last sync killed the battery life, and also prevented more than 99% charge by morning.
It turns out that iTunes had still not sync'd everything when I restored my backup, because at some random point it was hitting a wall at syncing several audio books I bought from Audible.com in 2003 or 2004, long before Amazon bought Audible. My username and password from Amazon were merged into the Audible.com account last week, after I bought some free kindle books that included free matching audiobooks. Apparently the files eventually made it onto the phone after multiple attempts to sync the backup to the new iPhone, and this username and password mismatch must have been giving the iPhone fits, and it was running hot and using up the battery.
I didn't know what was happening until I wiped the phone, restored iOS 6.0, and restored my backup again tonight (I really needed to restore my call logs and several years worth of texts, etc). I watched closely to see what files were being copied, or where in the process it would fail. That's when I had the Eureka moment, and made my discovery when it failed at those audio books. Strangely iTunes gave no errors at that point, it just quit syncing my backup and acted like it was done. I went to my settings and told it NOT to sync those books, and hit the sync button once again, and it finished the sync/restore of backup without further problems.
As I got close to finishing this post on my Mac, my iPhone was only down to 99% after 2.5 hours off the charger, with about 12 min use and 2hr 17min standby. Not syncing the old Audible books fixed the problem it seems. I'd give credit to the "restore to factory", but there were definitely some issues with restoring the backup until I didn't sync those books. I'm glad I was able to use my backup and not forced to start over from scratch. PS: After 3 hours and only about 20 minutes of use during that time it's at 98%, while earlier today at 3 hours I was at about 45%.
Earlier today (Sunday) I went from 99% at 10AM to 10% by 3PM. That's about 5 hours to drain the battery with light use! After the fix, in 2 hours of using the iPhone 5 for about 8 minutes, with 120 minutes of standby, I'm still at 100%. When I would look at Settings > General > Usage it didn't show any "usage" or "standby" time, acting like it was never fully charged (actually it was only at 99% when I woke up after 8 hours of charging). I estimate that I used it maybe 10 minutes for browsing, 30 minutes reading, 10 minutes phone calls, 5 text messages over that 5 hour period.
And I always have everything turned on with my AT&T iPhone 4S (including location, notification, WiFi) with no issues before. The 4S would only drop to 10% by 12 midnight (15 hours) with normal/moderate usage. But today I could actually watch the battery gauge drop 10-25% per hour, depending on whether I left the phone alone or used it a little. And the phone was running hot very often. I tried to reboot it a couple of times, and turned it off and back on several times but that didn't help and it kept running hot. The Apple store had no appointments till the next day, and the person keeping the Geniuses on schedule suggested removing all my apps or turning off location services to see if there was a conflict there with an older non-iOS 6 app.
I tried think of anything that could have made things go wrong. I had set up my iPhone 5 Friday night, and had sync'd my backup onto the new phone. At first I thought everything was there when it stopped loading stuff back onto my phone (apps, music, movies). But apparently it had never finished the "restore backup" process. Everything looked like it was done, including iTunes showing only 5GB of free memory on the phone. But each time I made a change to my app selections or playlists, the next sync would copy over extra files that should have already been on the phone from my backup. All day Saturday the battery life was fine, before I did my last sync when I went to bed. That last sync killed the battery life, and also prevented more than 99% charge by morning.
It turns out that iTunes had still not sync'd everything when I restored my backup, because at some random point it was hitting a wall at syncing several audio books I bought from Audible.com in 2003 or 2004, long before Amazon bought Audible. My username and password from Amazon were merged into the Audible.com account last week, after I bought some free kindle books that included free matching audiobooks. Apparently the files eventually made it onto the phone after multiple attempts to sync the backup to the new iPhone, and this username and password mismatch must have been giving the iPhone fits, and it was running hot and using up the battery.
I didn't know what was happening until I wiped the phone, restored iOS 6.0, and restored my backup again tonight (I really needed to restore my call logs and several years worth of texts, etc). I watched closely to see what files were being copied, or where in the process it would fail. That's when I had the Eureka moment, and made my discovery when it failed at those audio books. Strangely iTunes gave no errors at that point, it just quit syncing my backup and acted like it was done. I went to my settings and told it NOT to sync those books, and hit the sync button once again, and it finished the sync/restore of backup without further problems.
As I got close to finishing this post on my Mac, my iPhone was only down to 99% after 2.5 hours off the charger, with about 12 min use and 2hr 17min standby. Not syncing the old Audible books fixed the problem it seems. I'd give credit to the "restore to factory", but there were definitely some issues with restoring the backup until I didn't sync those books. I'm glad I was able to use my backup and not forced to start over from scratch. PS: After 3 hours and only about 20 minutes of use during that time it's at 98%, while earlier today at 3 hours I was at about 45%.
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