When Apple released both iOS 5 and the new iPhone 4S last month, they probably weren’t anticipating that they’d be putting some of their customers through a world of pain when it comes to battery life. Many folks have been reporting over the past few weeks that their iPhone loses about 10% worth of charge every 60 minutes, despite the fact that it’s just sitting on a desk doing nothing. Luckily Apple released iOS 5.0.1 yesterday, their first update to use the new patching system so people don’t have to download a massive 600+ MB system image just to fix a few minor bugs. The 45 MB download promised to fix the battery life issue, and for several folks it did, but pretty soon people began noticing that the update did absolutely nothing. Worse yet, some people who never even had a problem with battery life are now facing issues. Apple’s not said anything about the situation, but this doesn’t look good no matter which way you look at it.
Personally, I’ve never had an issue with battery life on iOS 5, but I did get duplicate contact and calendar entries when I turned on iCloud. To fix that I simply disabled iCloud, told it to delete everything that’s been synced to my device, effectively removing all my calendar entries and contacts, then I resynced with iTunes to get said data back on my iPhone. I’ve yet to turn iCloud on again. Problem solved. To those of you who are experiencing issues, now would be a good time to turn off all your push notifications, iCloud, GPS, even 3G connectivity if you must. It may not sound fun to run an iPhone like that, but at least you’ll be able to call and text without having to worry if your Jesus Phone can make it more than 8 hours on a full charge.
Update: Apple issued a brief statement to AllThingsD:
“The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices. We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”