Just two weeks into release of the iPhone 4S, Apple has taken the rather strange decision to get iPhone 4S users to help the Cupertino company get to the bottom of a mysterious battery drainage issue effecting some iPhone 4S users.
Apparently lots of users are experiencing issues with their batteries and Apple can’t figure out why, so they’ve taken to the forums and selected effected parties so they can install monitoring programs to get to the bottom of the issue.
This approach is actually a breath of fresh air, considering the way they handled antenna-gate. The news has come to light from the Guardian, which found a user in the UK who had been contacted by Apple after he wrote about his battery life problems online. “I then got a call from a senior engineer who said he had read my post and was ‘reaching out’ to users for data,” the user said. He had been experiencing a 10% drop in battery life every hour.
According to the reports, the engineer conceded there did seem to be a problem, but they weren’t able to pin-point the exact issue – so have opted to monitor the affected phone to see where the lost power is going.
The company’s data notes state the phone’s standby time is a projected 200 hours, which is lower than previous models, but Apple also stated that the 4S has a longer battery when it comes to 3G talk time.
Now, we’re nowhere near the levels of discontent shown towards antenna-gate on the iPhone 4 yet, but it does seem to be growing and must be concerning enough to Apple if they are now contacting users to monitor their phones.
There’s no real concensus for why some users are suffering severe battery loss, but some have fixed the issue by doing a clean restore, and others seemingly are pointing the finger at contacts imported from MobileMe, iCloud, or Google.
From our experience the culprit is likely to be the notification system, which has been known to overload the phone with constant updates from apps like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram – often having too many location-based apps could also be the issue.
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