Apple scrambling to isolate iPhone 4S battery drain problem

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(Free-Press-Release.com) November 2, 2011 -- Although there’s no arguing with the sales figures attributed to Apple’s iPhone 4S—it shifted some four million units during the first three days of availability—it seems a growing number of owners are falling out of love with their snazzy new smartphone.
Specifically, an initial trickle of customer complaints focusing on poor iPhone 4S battery life has gradually become more of a steady stream over the last week as more and more owners have discovered their handsets to be bleeding energy.

Going against the grain where battery life and Apple’s iPhone line are concerned, the latest smartphone entrant is apparently guilty of dropping between 10 and 15 percent of its charge every hour—even when the powered-on device is dormant.
According to a report in The Guardian, Apple’s engineers are aware of customer concerns regarding unusual energy seepage and are attempting to isolate the problem by asking certain iPhone 4S owners to run a special performance-monitoring program on their handsets.
While Apple is busy searching for the problem, Mark Smith of the Detroit Free Press reckons users can help reduce battery usage by preventing the iPhone 4S from automatically monitoring the device’s time zone placement.

“That might be a pain for the few users who often cross time zones. But for most people it shouldn’t be an issue,” he writes. “To turn off the setting, go to: Settings – Location Services – System Services, and turn off Setting Time Zone.”
Meanwhile, it has been suggested that corrupted contacts imported from MobileMe, the iCloud, or Google Contacts could also be contributing to the problem, with some users enjoying improved battery performance after deleting and re-installing contacts from the above services.
Also, diligent iPhone 4S owner ‘Exias’ has pointed the finger of blame at the handset’s Calendar Notifications function, which apparently causes the CPU to perform random cycles of between 70 and 75 percent.

“After disabling features one at a time, I have found that turning off calendar notifications drastically reduces cpu usage to a reasonable 4-8%,” he outlines on the official Apple support forum.
“After turning calendar notifications back on, cpu usage jumps right back to 70-75%,” he continues. “I [have] tried this many times for consistency and it has held true so far.”
At time of publication, an official Apple forum thread centering on the iPhone 4S battery issue has amassed some 2,960 customer replies and a whopping 193,500 views.

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