[gradient]

To those of you with the latest and greatest...how are your batteries holding up? There have been lots of reports of batteries lasting only 4-6 hours on light usage, so I'm curious what the experiences here have been. If it was a serious issue, I'd expect to have heard a lot more about it, mind you, so maybe these are just isolated incidents due iOS6 bugs?

[RowBearWa]

I left yesterday morning at 9:30 AM with a fully charged iPhone 5.

I crossed from 3G to 1X back to 3G and then to an LTE network then into a dead zone and finally back to a 3G coverage zone.

My total Celluar Usage on the phone from the Usage section showed 3h26 Min. My data usage shows a total of 350 MB sent and received.

I was making calls, checking e-mails and looking up web pages.

The phone was at 20% around 4 PM with no usage until 6:30 PM (I was in meetings till 6:15 PM) at which point, it quickly dropped to 10%.

While on the ferry at 7:20 PM crossing Lake Champlain, the signal dropped and the phone shut off.

I would say that the phone went through probably 5 hours of usage.

A problem that I experienced were "stuck" refreshes especially on the yahoo web pages where the phone would stay in refresh mode for minutes at a time on relatively simple pages.

I need the adapter from Apple to connect from the old charger to the new format, so I can connect while in the car. This will help avoid what happened last night where my daughters were worried because they could not get hold of me. Interestingly enough, my oldest's iPhone 5 died around the time that mine did and she was in the mountains with 1X or No signal for about 3 hours.

My youngest who is now using my old Droid X phone had lots of battery left, but she was not texting and surfing the web.

[pacman72]

I use the latest iPhone 5 in Australia and found that I couldnt get through 8 hours without having to place it back on charge.

I had push notifications and email turned on, siri and bluetooth also on and had almost no phone call usage.

I was surprised at how much shorter it was compared to my 4S which was doing the exact same thing

I turned siri off and now I would be lucky to use 30% of the battery I can now almost go 2 days without a charge.

[macmediausa]

I haven't given up my 4s yet and interchangeably use both throughout the day. I've had the 5 quit on me twice already by mid evening while the 4s had over 40%. I use the 4s considerably more because that's my main #. I'm not ready to make the full switch until they release some update to address this. BTW: I'm still running 5.1 and on Sprint (a weaker signal) on the older phone while the 5 is on Verizon

[Salsa]

It is well known that cell phones drain their batteries much faster when they have a weak signal. Since LTE isn't well built out well in most places, it will have a weaker signal and drain the battery. YMMV.

[Doc HM]

I find my 5 struggles to get through a day. By around 4.00 each afternoon it's pretty much gone. I also find the wireless reception to much worse than my 4. There are parts of my house that my 4 will happily sit on the wireless network whereas the 5 will drop the signal.
The 5 also loves to keep asking me for network passwords ALL the time. Most annoying.

Am lining up for a restore to see if this helps.

[Cold Warrior]

Try resetting network settings first.

[ort888]

I've been pretty unimpressed with the battery life. It seems slightly worse than my 3.5 year old 3GS, which is not so hot.

It won't get through a whole day unless I hardly touch it. Watching video drains it 10% for every 30 minutes of watching. That's 5 hours of video playing, when they advertise "up to 10 hours".

I've gone through a whole reset cycle a few times now and it seems to be getting a little better. I'm hoping that in a few weeks it will improve. I've seen that happen before.

The weird thing is that when I cycle it, it get's down to 1% and hangs on for at least another 20 minutes. That gives me some hope it will sort itself out with more calibration...

But if it's still bad in a few weeks, I think I'm going to exchange it for a different one.

[subego]

I get 4 to 5 hours of heavy use.

I'll try turning off Siri and see what happens.

[gradient]

Where do you guys tend to have your screen brightness set? I wonder how much of a difference it makes. I'm used to have my iP4 set to about 3/4 brightness so would expect to have it set around the same place on the 5.

Also, has anyone here tried comparing battery life over a cycle between having LTE on vs. disabled? It's interesting to hear that Siri has an impact, maybe there's an underlying issue that could be easily fixed in a software update there. It wouldn't bother me much to turn it off permanently, though, as I can't imagine having much use for it (I just have a general distaste for voice commands, somehow it rarely seems any faster than doing things by hand).

[subego]

It should make a pretty big difference. I've got mine set to about 1/3.

[subego]

My short term experiment is Siri has no effect on battery life. Heavy use is still about 12 points of drain per hour.

[gradient]

Originally Posted by subego 

My short term experiment is Siri has no effect on battery life. Heavy use is still about 12 points of drain per hour.

Is this with LTE on? If that's the case, have you tried comparing with it off?

[Cold Warrior]

http://www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html

Don't know if that helps understand apple's procedures.

[subego]

Originally Posted by gradient 

Is this with LTE on? If that's the case, have you tried comparing with it off?

I have not.

I'm assuming that is making little difference because my phone is connected to a Microcell, and is hence only 3G.

[Tanker10a]

Resetting the Network Settings is the ticket.
I am currently waiting for my iPhone 5 to arrive. My iPhone 4 went into an aggressive sleep due to battery issues. I had to do a hard Reset in order to wake it. I then recharged it and subsequently, I have read on MacWorld.com to go to Settings and to Reset the Network Settings; which means that the IOS6 is the main culprit not the iPhone 5.
Once I did that, the iPhone 4 has managed power far more efficiently. I watched a lot of YouTube music, photography, DIY and golf videos and I use the iPod music function of my iPhone a lot. So I put this device's battery to the test every day and all day. Also, it's a very good idea to refresh the iPhone's battery (cycling the battery) by allowing it to drain to zero percent before recharging it regardless the model. Three different models of iPhone later (iPhone 1, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4) , this procedure alone has always yielded great results for me...

[subego]

Originally Posted by subego 

I have not.
I'm assuming that is making little difference because my phone is connected to a Microcell, and is hence only 3G.

Bad assumption apparently. Turning off cellular data has massively improved my battery life

[subego]

Have had cellular data off for a week now. Truly massive difference in battery life.

The main issue is iMessage getting shunted to my iPad when I don't remember to turn data back on when I'm out of wifi range.

[Salsa]

It's possible that all you had to do wast turn off LTE. As I wrote in the fifth post in this thread, LTE isn't as fully built-out, so the phone struggles with the weak signal. I wasn't using cellular data at all on my iPad, yet my battery life was abysmal until I turned off LTE. Even though I didn't have a data plan, the cellular radio was trying to connect anyway.

[subego]

That's probably worth doing, but my 4S had similarly shitty battery life, and no LTE signal to cope with.

[subego]

Just to reiterate the battery improvement, I actually let myself not plug it in to charge last night, and it could still go for five or six more hours. I never got even a whole day with my 4S.