iPhone 4S Release Date: iPhone 4 Had Antennagate, iPhone 4S Has Batterygate - Are There Solutions?
Scores of customers who bought the wildly popular iPhone 4S have complained about the subpar battery life of the device.
The battery, according to iFixIt (a technology website) was reported to have 100 hours less of standby time than its predecessor, the iPhone 4, but at least an hour more talk time. iPhone 4S users are posting examples of their phones losing 10, 12, or even 15 percent of its battery life per hour.
A quick look at the Apple website’s support forum reveals thousands of iPhone 4S users dissatisfied with their phone’s battery life, with over 160 pages of questions, speculations, and theories regarding the widespread problem.
The last iPhone to be released, the iPhone 4, had a similarly challenging problem: its antenna was positioned poorly, resulting in many dropped calls for customers. The architects of Apple’s iPhone worked tirelessly to redesign the casing, which fixed the issue once and for all.
The multi-billion dollar company also made its efforts as public as possible, firing an executive, holding press conferences, and making its antenna laboratory practically transparent.
Now, Apple has a tougher job: finding out how to correct a more complicated concern like battery life. Certainly, redesigning the battery would be a monumental task.
According to The Guardian, the preliminary response has been Apple engineers telling frustrated consumers to install a particular type of monitoring software so they can find out more about where the problem is originating.
iPhone 4S users are taking problems into their own hands, however. Several solutions have emerged that some consumers say alleviates the stress on the battery, providing much better battery life.
The first one is turning off the Time Zone setting. A number of users think that a bug in software constantly tries to reset the time of the phone as if it is changing countries.
A second solution was presented by TimothyW on the Apple support forum: “So, it appears that Notification Center has an endless loop in collecting the calendar events from Exchange and this is burning up our 4S batteries. Once you stop the madness from Notification Center, your iPhone 4S will perform as advertised.”
According to responses from the forum, this resolution has improved the iPhone 4S’s life significantly.
Apple has not released an official statement concerning the battery life of its newest device.