No one is happy with their smartphone battery life these days but the release of iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 has increased the complaints from iPhone users. Not just users of the new iPhone 5 but from those using older models, who have installed the new operating system.
It turns out iOS 6 is taking a toll on batteries in the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Eric Zeman, a technology writer for Information Week, reports testing the iPhone 5 for 10 days and finding the battery life to be very good. He credits it to a larger battery and efficient power management in the A6 processor.
But when he installed the new operating system on older iPhones, it was a different story.
Noticeable change
"With Wi-Fi on, but cellular data turned off on the 4 and 4S, neither device lasts 24 hours any more," he writes. "They used to--and still should--last several days at a minimum."
But not everyone is as happy with their iPhone 5 battery life as Zeman is. Jim Tanous, writing in the MacObserver, says a strong LTE signal will run down the iPhone 5 battery faster than a weak signal, or when connected via 3G.
"While all cellular devices experience decreased battery life when cellular signals are weak, the relatively few areas with strong LTE signals means that iPhone 5 users may see less than half of Apple's advertised running time," he writes.
Other headaches
Apple's new iOS 6 appears to be causing other types of headaches as well. Jean, of Milford, PA, reports her daughter's iPhone 4S has been unable to connect via WiFi since she installed iOS 6.
"Her phone worked fine with iOS 5.1 but once she updated to iOS 6.0 then no WiFi," Jean wrote in a ConsumerAffairs post. "We tried everything, but all failed."
Jaime, of Ironton, Ohio, has an even older iPhone, the 3GS. She reports that her phone locked up when she updated it with iOS 6.
"I attempted to restore my phone with iTunes, this did not work as my phone continued to be locked up," Jaime posted on ConsumerAffairs. "I called AT&T, my Wireless Service Provider, they called Apple Customer Care, they suggested I try and do the restore again because their servers were bogged down with all the IOS6 problems. I tried to restore again with no luck."
Just get a new phone
Jaime said an Apple rep's suggestion to her was spending $149 and getting a new iPhone.
"Why should I have to spend money to replace my phone, when they created the problem in the first place," she asked.
Meanwhile, Adam Engst, writing on the Apple news site Tidbits, thinks he's stumbled across another possible reason for the rapid battery drain on phones running iOS 6. He traced his problem to corrupted bookmarks in his phone's browser.
"Since I don't really use Safari, I'd never worried about the fact that the bookmarks had been imported from multiple other systems years ago and horribly duplicated through who knows what syncing services," he writes. "Despite this, they'd never caused problems in previous versions of iOS."
How they voted
Yes
Yes