My friend Neil has been having some major battery problems with his iPhone 3GS. This is not my first friend to experience battery drain issues. Another friend Jeff had the same type of issue and Apple ultimately replaced his iPhone 3G. Here is Neil's current story.
A few weeks ago, I started noticing a major battery drain on my iPhone 3GS. Coincidently, it was when AT&T was having problems with towers in our area. Being a tech junkie the only other change I had made to my iPhone around the time I started having battery issues was right after I installed the AP Mobile app. The battery issue was so bad that it would go from 100% to 18% in just over 5 hrs. I am not a heavy phone user, I had push email enabled but we are only talking about 50 or so emails during this time frame.
Time to Start Troubleshooting
Since I cannot move, fixing the towers is one thing I cannot solve, so I started by removing the AP Mobile App. Over the next 5hr testing window I noticed little to no change in battery performance.
AT&T confirmed the tower issue had been resolved and this made sense because both my wife and I stopped dropping calls. It was the dropped calls that lead us to investigate a potential issue with AT&T. Regardless, back to troubleshooting. Now that AP Mobile and AT&T towers are not to blame I started removing apps and disabling functionality.
My phone was fully neutered. I removed 10 Apps, turned off 3G, turned off WiFI, turned off bluetooth, turned off push email, and turned off notification. Shockingly turning my phone into a Motorola Razr fixed the issue.
Recreating the Problem
I did not want to reintroduce everything at one time so I started with push email. BAM! Yesterday with push email enabled over a 4hr window my battery went from 85% to 18% in 4 hrs. During that 4hr windows I received just 15 emails, other than that the phone sat idle.
A friend of mine suggested restoring the phone to factory settings. All the jokes on PC's over the years and now I get this suggestion about a non PC product, go figure. I was not concerned with losing my installed apps because iTunes would install them again. My concern was all the application data I knew doing a factory restore would wipe out. Applications like Evernote store information in the cloud but many apps store everything locally. All my SMS/MMS would be gone. I kick myself because I missed the TouchCopy article Rod is rubbing in my face now. TouchCopy could have saved my messages. Anyway a factory restore also kills all my logs and configurations.
Appears to be Solved
I bit the bullet and proceeded to do a full restore. Once restored I setup my Exchange, GMail, and reinstalled all apps. I have done most of my configurations but there is always something you miss like the signature, Sent from my iPhone. Not a chance, no free advertising on this train. This seems to have solved the problem. Time will tell, but so far for the past two hours, the phone has gone down 2% and unlike before it is cool to touch.
What hurt the most was all my fuel log and car maintenance log data in GC Lite and Road Trip Lite is lost. If I can get my iPhone to perform like it did before having this battery issue some of this pain is forgiven. This pain makes me realize that Apple is no better than Microsoft despite the smug, double speak commercials.
Rod tells me that another friend Jeff did the exact same thing I did and saw improvements for a short term, but ultimately he want to Apple for help. I hope Rod is wrong. If not I will reschedule my Genius Bar appointment. Â As of Saturday, March 13, 2010 my phone ran for 21 hrs and only used 19% of the battery.
