iPhone 4S Users Drained by Battery Bug

KOMPAS.com - Battery life issues with the iPhone 4S, which even Apple's own store staff have struggled to fix, are being investigated by the company.

Suspected bugs in iOS5 have caused the battery on the new iPhone model to drain rapidly for some users – and frustrated customers have been flooding online forums. A thread on the issues on Apple's own forums has had almost 2200 replies and over 140,000 views

One Australian Apple store employee and app developer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said while doing nothing with the phone his battery life was dropping 10 per cent an hour even with non important location settings, Siri, Bluetooth and other features switched off.

With normal use he dropped 19 per cent in 50 minutes and sometimes the battery dropped away at an even faster rate than that.

"I've been a developer using beta iOS5 on iPhone 4 right through to Gold Master and then upgraded to 4S whereby I can notice a big battery difference between the two models," the store staffer told Fairfax Media.

"I guess in Apple's defence they did state it has 100 hours less standby time."

However, over the weekend fixes have been circulating web forums and the same Apple store staffer quoted above was able to finally fix the problem.

"It was to do with Location Services constantly checking my location especially for the Time Zone," he said.

He was able to solve the problem by switching everything off in the Location Services > System Services menu except for Cell Network Search. His phone now lasts "pretty much the whole day".

The Guardian reported that a flaw in iOS5, which caused the phone to constantly check its location even when there was no apparent reason to do so, was the culprit. This can be turned off by disabling the "Setting Time Zone" function.