I’ve struggled over the last month with the battery life on my iPhone 4S. I haven’t been able to make it through the day without having to recharge. And I couldn’t figure out why.
When I traveled to CES last week, I was with my brother-in-law and throughout the day we would compare battery life to see if mine was draining faster, and the difference was incredible. Luckily, he had told me about the ZAGG Sparq 2 which allows me to easily recharge my iPhone or iPad, so I wasn’t in any trouble. However, he has the iPhone 4 vs. the iPhone 4S, so I wasn’t able to do a true apples to apples comparison.
This weekend I went golfing with a friend and he also has the 4S, so I decided to see how our battery life compared throughout the round. I knew that over the course of a 4 hour period that my battery would be almost dead and I was curious to see how his held up.
I wish our battery life had been as consistent as our drives.
Sure enough, throughout the day my battery was draining much faster. In fact, it was draining THREE TIMES FASTER. I checked his location services and he had almost 20 more of those running than me. Then I checked his notifications and again, he had at least a dozen more notifications running. Both of us had Siri off.
And he was running a GPS-heavy golf app and I wasn’t. GPS is notorious for sucking battery life. Still, I was losing battery so much faster than him it was comical.
I started searching through his settings to see what could possibly be creating this difference in battery drain. We were thoroughly convinced that I must have an app or two that were running in the background somehow or pinging a server somewhere, when I found it – iCloud.
He didn’t have iCloud turned on and I did. I quickly turned off iCloud on my iPhone and we started comparing.
Over the next three hours (we had dinner that night with our families), his phone actually lost battery life almost TWICE AS MUCH AS MINE DID. So I went from a battery drain three times faster than his to suddenly my batter drain was only 1/2 of his. This is likely because he had so many notifications and location services turned on.
So iCloud, you’re killing battery life on iPhones everywhere. Unfortunately, there’s no way (that I know of) to adjust the settings on iCloud. So for instance, you can’t tell it to sync only every hour or once a day. My guess is it checks constantly and I’m pretty sure it was my photo stream that must have been the main culprit.
My next step will be to turn on and off certain settings to see if its just iCloud in general or if its certain elements syncing that drains the battery so much.
