IPhone 4S Battery Life: Best solutions and procedures for 1st time user: 1-Do you have a battery life issue (learn first what the usage time spec is about) 2-What can you try to remedy the situation without reading 500 pages of posts

Question

What follows is a grouping of some of the most fruitful procedures - from what I've seen in the biggest battery life issue thread - and some background information and discussion for solving or improving the battery life with the iPhone 4S and may be applicable also to devices on which iOS 5.0/5.0.1 has been applied. Credit goes to the respective users who contributed this information to the forum and they should be commended for doing so. This is not a final listing. The goal here is to provide a first stop sort of knowledge base document for newcomers instead of having them perusing the never ending threads where the wheel is reinvented on every page...
Please don't post your questions, usage screenshots, or claims that it worked or not for you or anything here except PROCEDURES/DEBUG STEPS/SOLUTIONS or improvements to the procedures already listed here. Try to use point form and to be as concise and clear as possible. Hope all this helps.
Thank you and good luck!
General info and specs
First, take a look Apple's battery tips, info and specs(obligatory reading for all Iphone 4S users - read it once and for all):
http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html
http://www.apple.com/batteries/
... you didn't read it? loll Always remember this i.e. the definition of "usage":
Usage: Amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge.  The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.
I'm still not convinced you read the links so here's what Apple has to say in terms of fine tuning your battery life:
Optimize your settings
Depending on how they are configured, a few features may decrease your iPhone battery life.  For example, the frequency with which you retrieve email and the number of email accounts you auto-check can both affect battery life. The tips below apply to an iPhone running iOS 5.0 or later and may help extend your battery life.
Minimize use of location services: Applications that actively use location services such as Maps may reduce battery life. To disable location services, go to Settings > General > Location Services or use location services only when needed.
Turn off push notifications: Some applications from the App Store use the Apple Push Notification service to alert you of new data. Applications that extensively rely on push notifications (such as instant messaging applications) may impact battery life. To disable push notifications, go to Settings > Notifications and set Notifications to Off. Note that this does not prevent new data from being received when the application is opened. Also, the Notifications setting will not be visible if you do not have any applications installed that support push notifications.
Fetch new data less frequently: Applications such as Mail can be set to fetch data wirelessly at specific intervals.  The more frequently email or other data is fetched, the quicker your battery may drain. To fetch new data manually, from the Home screen choose Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap Manually. To increase the fetch interval, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap Hourly. Note that this is a global setting and applies to all applications that do not support push services.
Turn off push mail: If you have a push mail account such as Yahoo! or Microsoft Exchange, turn off push when you don’t need it. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and set Push to Off. Messages sent to your push email accounts will now be received on your phone based on the global Fetch setting rather than as they arrive.
Auto-check fewer email accounts: You can save power by checking fewer email accounts. This can be accomplished by turning off an email account or by deleting it. To turn off an account, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, choose an email account, and set Account to Off. To remove an account, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, choose an email account, and tap Delete Account.
Turn off Wi-Fi: If you rarely use Wi-Fi, you can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. Note that if you frequently use your iPhone to browse the web, battery life may be improved by using Wi-Fi instead of cellular data networks.
Turn off Bluetooth: If you rarely use a Bluetooth headset or car kit, you can turn off Bluetooth to save power.  Go to Settings > General > Bluetooth and set Bluetooth to Off.
Use Airplane Mode in low- or no-coverage areas: Because your iPhone always tries to maintain a connection with the cellular network, it may use more power in low- or no-coverage areas.  Turning on Airplane Mode can increase battery life in these situations; however, you will be unable to make or receive calls.  To turn on Airplane Mode, go to Settings and set Airplane Mode to On.
Adjust brightness: Dimming the screen is another way to extend battery life.  Go to Settings > Brightness and drag the slider to the left to lower the default screen brightness. In addition, turning on Auto-Brightness allows the screen to adjust its brightness based on current lighting conditions.  Go to Settings > Brightness and set Auto-Brightness to On.
Turn off EQ: Applying an equalizer setting to song playback on your iPhone can decrease battery life.  To turn EQ off, go to Settings > iPod > EQ and tap Off. Note that if you’ve added EQ to songs directly in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ on iPhone to Flat in order to have the same effect as Off because iPhone keeps your iTunes settings intact.  Go to Settings > iPod > EQ and tap Flat.
Usage specs for the 4S - http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html:
Talk time: Up to 8 hours (12.5% per hour drain) on 3G, up to 14 hours (7.1% per hour drain) on 2G (GSM)
Standby time: Up to 200 hours (0.5% per hour drain)
Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G (16.6% per hour drain), up to 9 hours (11.1% per hour drain) on Wi-Fi
Video playback: Up to 10 hours (10% per hour drain)
Audio playback: Up to 40 hours (2.5% per hour drain)
So a scenario of normal usage could be for example: 4 heavy hours of 3G internet browsing (66.4%), with one hour of call on 3G (12.5%) and 22 hours of standby (11%) = 100%
A battery life issue is a problem where the drain is really out of spec either during usage or standby or both. For example, multi-% per minute drain during usage or a 10% drain per hour during standby is problematic. Browsing the internet on 3G during one hour and losing 16-17% is not.
Apple's test methodology for claiming the specs:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html
Procedures
davidch tips (reset+full discharge recharge):
Go through these steps to address the battery after updating to iOS 5.0.1:
1. Reset all settings (settings app-> general-> reset)
2. Go through initial setup steps (lang, wifi, siri, enable location, etc) and choose setup as new phone (don't worry your apps, data, contacts, mail will still be there). Do NOT restore from iCloud or iTunes (It can copy back corrupt settings)
3. Turn off system location services timezone and iAd
4. Fully discharge battery  (tilll it shuts off with the spinning wheel)
5. Fully recharge battery (overnight if possible)
In my experience this improves the Standby battery drain issue significantly in most cases.  It reduces drain from 2-4% or more per hr to 0.5% or less. It has worked for many, many users now. If it does not work after a few try's you may have a real battery or hardware issue and should contact Apple.  Good Luck!
ram130's variant of davidch i.e. additional steps:
Now using davidch original steps and attaching the tweaks I made to get me more usage. As shown on page 29.
Go through these steps to address the battery after updating to iOS 5.0.1:
1. Reset all settings (settings app-> general-> reset)
2. Go through initial setup steps (lang, wifi, siri, enable location, etc) and choose setup as new phone (don't worry your apps, data, contacts, mail will still be there). Do NOT restore from iCloud or iTunes (It can copy back corrupt settings)
3. Turn off system location services timezone and iAd
4. Fully discharge battery  (till it shuts off with the spinning wheel)
5. Fully recharge battery (overnight if possible)
6. Disable Siri 'Raise To Speak' and REBOOT *( if possible use another camera to verify the                 infrared is off after the reboot).
7. Set emails, icloud and calendars to fetch. ** test. Mines on hourly.
8. If your in a no signal and your phone is saying "Searching..." even after 10mins, reboot while in that area and after 1-2min it should say "No Service". This mainly applies to Verizon customers and improve battery life in these areas.
9. *optional* Goto Settings > General > Network and you will see "Hotspot.." loading something, wait a few seconds and it should say "setup personal hotspot" then exit out.
* I notice a great improvement after disabling this and rebooting. This increased my "screen on" usage or at least helped it. Make the change.
** I have not tested push yet to narrow down the drain but I had this change on my phone. I believe exchange push is responsible for some stand by drain. As for icloud, haven't notice much of a difference. Just try it for a day. My email still came in fast most times. Again still testing, will report back on these..
buxbuster tips(wifi sync, iCloud):
These are my own tested workarounds that worked for my iPhone 4S and seemed to have worked for others as well :
Workaround number 1. Deselect wifi-sync in iTunes and press sync.
If that doesn't work try :
Workaround number 2 : Remove iCloud, reset network settings. ( I guess this won't work for you since you don't have it enabled ).
If both workarounds fail, you can always try to completely wipe your phone. That also solved some of the cases out there.
rolandomerida tips - i.e. buxbuster and additional steps:
Finally, I solved the syncing error loop. My contacts are syncing flawessly again between my devices and iCloud, and yes, the battery stopped draining, which is the main topic here.
I followed instructions from buxbuster (check his workaround a few pages up!) and an additional BIG step to restore contacts and syncing, as seen in a MacRumors forum.
This is what I did:
1. Make a backup of your Address Book, using the vCard option (or both, it doesn't hurt). Save it for later.
2. In your iPhone, delete iCloud account. When it asks, accept both: delete AND delete from my iPhone.
3. Reset network settings. The iPhone will restart, then will ask you to unlock the SIM card.
4.Turn Wi-Fi on.
5. Add the iCloud account again.
That's for Buxbuster's workaround. For some, it might work just like that. My iPhone repopulated from iCloud after step 5, but I still had that "server error" on iCloud. I had to do some extra steps, since my Mac was not syncing to iCloud and couldn't edit anything on my Mac or iCloud. Syncing back had to be fixed, too. If not, the syncing loop would continue from my iPhone, and the battery would drain awfully again.
1. In System Preferences -> iCloud, I turned Contacts off. I chose "keep on My Mac" those contacts, but I got an empty Address Book after a while. And a few minutes later, iCloud contacts were empty and my iPhone also. It is scary at first! Now, before importing that vCard backup...
2. Turn Wi-Fi off. This is important, since your contact-empty iCloud will attempt to wipe your Address Book from your Mac in seconds after importing.
3. Import your vCard backup to Address Book. Just drag it to your blank Address Book window; it asks if you want to import "x" number of cards. Of course, say yes.
4. Turn Wi-Fi on, and then iCloud contacts on again (System Preferences -> iCloud). It will offer to merge your newly populated Address Book with iCloud (which is empty at this point). It should upload every single contact to iCloud, and then to your iDevices. If not, a fifth step would be to import the vCard file to iCloud, but it shouldn't be necessary.
So, with iCloud syncing working correctly, there is no battery draining! Again, that was my particular issue.
I can't tell if this is the single answer to the widely spread battery draining problem, but it sure can be fixed with these workarounds, and yes, Apple should address the problem with a future update, for we affected customers don't need workarounds in the first place
This is the MacRumors discussion:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1256807
And dont' forget to check buxbuster's fix, video, and THANK him!
Miless tips (full 800mb release of 5.0.1 and sanitizing a restore):
As for 4S battery life. Try doing this,
1. Settings>Location Service ... disable all location services you do not need. In particularly Facebook because it drains the battery a lot.
Scroll down to the bottom at Settings>Location services>System Services ... Disable Setting Time zone, location based iAds, Diagnostic & Usage.
2. Settings>Notification>Calendar ... turn off the Notification Centre.
3. Settings>General>Reset ... do Reset All Settings. Doing this will not wipe out your iPhone. It will just Reset the network settings, location warning, keyboard dictionary, etc... but it will clear up some corrupted data there. Generally this will help.
Try these 3 steps first... if it still drains a lot, try the following,
4. Drain your battery down to 1%. Then charge it up using USB from PC ... not the charger. The charger output 1.0 A ( x 5V from USB ... you get 5W power). From PC, output is only 0.5A x 5V = 2.5W power. Charging is slower but trickle charge 4S helps the battery retain its charge better. I think it takes about 3-3.5 hours to charge full from USB/PC compared to slightly below 2 hours using iPhone charger.
If after doing the above still could not solve your battery issues (mine with iOS 5.0 was ok up to step 4, but not iOS 5.0.1).... plug you iPhone to a charger (any charger), from iPhone, access your iCloud ... set it up if you havent. Back up your iPhone data to iCloud. if you do not have enough storage (only 5GB is free), go to details and select the apps you need its data backup, choose only those you really need and leave those unnecessary ones out. Back up your camera roll to your PC/Mac manually as it could be too big to backup to iCloud.... once you have it setup, make sure you are on Wifi ...  tap backup to iCloud from your iPhone. It will take a while if the file is huge.
Once backup to iCloud is completed, plug your iPhone to PC/Mac and launch iTunes 10.5.1 (make sure you have 10.5.1)
Click Restore. It will automatically initiate a download of iOS 5.0.1 ipsw for iPhone 4S. Wait for the whole process to finish, ie. download, restore software/firmware.
Once its done, do not set up your iPhone from iTunes. Set it up on your iPhone. Go through the selection. When prompted, select restore from iCloud (from your iphone backup earlier). Keep your iphone plugged into iTunes while restoring backup from iCloud. Because while restoring from iClouds, some data will be synced from iTunes if you plug in, e.g. music, video, etc... unless you bought these content from iTunes store. Apps will be downloaded from App Store from the cloud.
Once it's all done restored. Turn off your iPhone,.. and turn it on again.
Now, hopefully your battery wont be draining so fast anymore. Usually it wont after this. But you need to charge your battery at least 4-5 cycles to stabilize the charge on the battery. I dont know why... but battery life seems to get better and better for me after a few charge cycles after all the above work.
Good luck. Let us know if it works for you.
W. Raider tips (Sirii):
Bottom line for me of things that helped battery life are:
1. Turing off Siri and Rebooting the phone by holding the Home button and Top button down, ignoring the slider, until the phone shut down. (turn off Siri, reboot, and check top front of iPhone 4S against a lesser camera like the front-facing camera on an iPad2 - making sure the IR sensor is off)
2. Fully draining the battery, meaning using the phone until it shuts itself off from a drained battery and then recharging it to 100% about 4, maybe 5 times. I charged it both with a Mac and a wall charger.
Hope this is helpful!
Comments
jmm514 remarks (Twitter):
I may have found something. I had Twitter disabled in my notifications, but got a tweet today that popped up on my home screen. Didn't know I had this enabled. At the bottom of the Twitter notification settings is the home scrren toggle. Since disabling this, battery life seems better. Considering there is no setting for frequency of checking for tweets, it appears the phone is continually connecting to wifi to check for new tweets.
tmksnyder comments (notifications, corrupt data in iCloud):
For me, I found my iphone on wifi mysteriously connecting to my mac.  I eventually narrowed it down to the Apple Move Trailers app which keeps a file in iCloud.  The phone was trying to sync the file with the mac in the background even when the Movie Trailers app was closed (hitting the red x).  Based on my macosx logs the iCloud process that was trying to sync was working directly between the phone and the mac without using itunes by connecting to an https address hosted on the phone.  It was connecting every 3 minutes and failing (while phone was awake or awake during during a notification).  I also found that iCloud control panel on OSX would error if I tried to delete the file.  I fixed it by removing the App and doing a hard reset which stopped the sync.  I probably could have turned off iCloud document sync in the phone but didn't think of that.  My battery life has greatly improved while at home on wifi.    I am now at 28 hrs standby, 2 hrs 20 minutes of usage, and 68% battery.  It was ok before where I could get 20-30 hrs standby and 6 -8 hrs usage.  My usage today was phone calls, 3g surfing, and music via bluetooth in the car.
I also found even with Itunes iMatch, if I mass updated tages, art work etc, it would hit the phone on wifi even in standby.  I was amazed.   Granted if I am not doing updates, Match won't hot the phone so this was a once in awhile event.  I could drop my percentage by 5-10% in a matter of minutes when doing updates.   I think a lot of our problems are background processes, associated with iCloud, notification, and apps.  More features means more battery.   I think the key thing is to keep track of what has recently been added or changed if battery life gets worse all of a sudden.   It may be an app that was recently installed and if possible you may want to completely remove it and not just quit it.
With twitter, i think it uses push notifications so it doesn't need to be running and actively poll on the phone. For instance , if i quit the mail app, i still will get mail notifications and can swipe the message and load mail. Apple Push Notifications servics maintain the connection to the phone and there are likely pings or connection checks  that occur for the service on an os level not an app level.  This minimizes the load so there arent a bunch of apps all runing and constantly checking.  The notification service , if it is contacted from twitter or another service with data, will check the settings you have registered to the with the apple push service and send the notification to your phone.  No matter what, there is a drain with notifications. M hunch is once one application is configured to receive notifications, connection checking occurs betwen the push service and the phone so it knows where it is on the network. If it is implemented correctly, these checks arent frequent if you are still and more frequent as you move. The other drain is for when the noification hits and is processsed.  If i get 9 emails over night, my screen just popped up for 20 seconds or so to process each message using battery.  I would even think that just go from low power to turning n the screen uses more juice than if the device was already on and i get the message.  On nights I get no notifications, I see a 3  or 4 percent drop.  On nights with a number of notifications, i have seen up to a 10 percent drop.  Besides notifications, wifi sync and icloud will poll on the local network and use up battery if the host computer is on and running itunes or trying to sync a data file that is corrupt (which i had with the apple movie trailers app causing my phone to drain).  For me turning off wifi sync and remving a corrupt file in icloud solved my battery issues and I get over 24 hrs of standby with 6 to 9 hrs of use and this is with all the normal location services and push serivices turned on.
See http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ipad/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Co nceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/ApplePushService/ApplePushService.html for more info.  I think it has a good overview of how the notifications work.

Answer 1

Well seems like that rumor of iOS 5.0.1 is finally gone the way of the dogs since developers got a beta of 5.1. So as stated earlier in the master discussion-> I suspect if you are filling up this thread with false post or creating a master set of links to various post that are unreliable you are wasting your time. Press is not going to touch the story due to poor or inaccurate sources which may be links from the master thread. This can include inaccurate information, combination of conflicting post or postings from users which may not own the device. Reputable press organizations have policies that require discloser and strict rules about what is a reliable source for a story. It is clear that many of the post in the master thread, which are links presented here are questionable. 
Sorry to say that postings taken without any analysis of their totality have been propagated via various sites, for example sites such as http://www.2012federalbudget(dot)com. (Do not visit but I suspect that this is not the 2012 federal-budget site you would expect based on analysis of the records. There are plenty of sites like http://www.2012federalbudget(dot)com propagating questionable post in these threads.) One site for example in the discussion thread used a self signed certificate, the site had a log in to allow users to enter their OpenID. Seems many of these sites are pop and drop drupel configurations.
So remember this is how the really bad rumor of iOS 5.0.2 got started, the 5.1 memory leak issue, iCloud Issues, call quality, address book, etc.
Some of the postings have been very comical, I think the latest now is a dropbox issue. Seems that the length of the previous thread has resulted in various app engines of some proxy servers/tools reaching their limits.
So I would make sure to know the source of any information you link to. Make sure you avoid entering any information to outside links such as OpenID or Apple ID, these are big prize items for anyone with malicious intent.  If you have issues and are a valid user contact APPLE CARE. (Note link is using McAfee Secure Short URL Service, and is https.)
http://mcaf.ee/ricdt
The original solution still represents a high level of success for users having any battery issues.
Install 5.0.1 on your iPhone 4s. Some users posting they are still using older versions, bad fake serial numbers, etc.
Make sure your device can run iOS 5.0.1 and is not altered.
Make sure you use a new Sim, not some cut down version which many users admit to doing. (Again, worth confirming what people are posting.)
Reset the device doing a hard reset and software reset.
Let battery drain and then charge for the full cycle, which is 24 hours.
I think you will find you will get the battery usage that APPLE has stated for the device.
Best of luck, stay safe and thanks