Much as I love my iPhone I have an annoying battery issue that is proving problematic. It has two serious issues with its battery.

The first issue is that it will sometimes forget to update its charge status. So you will charge it, use it for a while and then notice that the charge indicator is still on 100%.

When it gets in this state it will stay at 100% forever, it will quite happily run down and turn itself off without any battery warning and will still show 100% seconds before it dies.

You can reset the charge state by restarting, at which point the charge indicator shows the real battery level.

The second issue is that sometimes it will discharge very quickly. For example today I unplugged it from the charger at 06:00. It was showing 100% charge when I unplugged it. I plugged it into the car charger for the 80 minute drive to the office.

I used it lightly for through the morning and then listened to MP3s with it for at hour. By 13:00 the 20% battery warning was up, a few minutes later it was down to 10%.

The usage stats show usage as 4 hours 40 and standby of 6 hours 30. Which is impossible, as I only unplugged it from the charger 8 hours ago.

This second issue seems to happen fairly regularly. It happened twice last week.

I'm guessing the two issues might be related. The first issue also happened sometimes on my first phone (this one is a refurb after a replacement), but I don't think the second issue ever happened with the first phone.

Googling for this wasn't really very useful. Does anyone else have problem like this ?

It is an iPhone 3G with Wifi on, 3G on and Bluetooth off. It is possible that the second issue has only started happening since I started using Nuevasync.com via ActiveSync.

Return the phone to Apple in exchange for a new one?

The first issue happened with my old one and also happens with my wifes phone, so doesn't seem likely to be a hardware problem. It is far from clear that the second issue is a hardware problem anyway.

There isn't much point of going through the hassle of swapping it out again if it is a software/config problem.

For what it's worth, I've never seen that behavior on my iPhone, its charge behavior and charge indicator behavior is steady and consistent.

Although this won't solve the strange 100 percent indicator problem, I have a few tips about saving battery on the thing:

One thing I do is to set the email grab frequency to its largest setting which I think is an hour or more. I.e., I don't rely on push or on frequent updates, if I want to know if I have email I just open the email app.

Another thing that might be useful is to clear out as many Wifi Hotspot names out of your phone as possible. The thing can use a ton of battery trying to get and maintain a wifi connection. If you join to a lot of wifi hotspots named "linksys" or "wireless", then as you roam around it's constantly connecting and disconnecting to common hotspot names.

I can't say that I have seen my phone stick at 100% like yours either. It has adjusted though, where I see it at say 20%, and shortly after being in a dock, it jumps to 40% or so.

As for the battery drain issues, I've noticed it can vary depending on what app you leave open when turning off the screen. If I leave Google Maps open for example, the GPS still seems to remain on and tracking. If I leave the camera open, it seems to keep the sensor active, along with the GPS. Both scenarios lead to pretty rapid battery drain, and an indicator in the usage panel that the phone was not fully in standby mode.

I've never had these problems. My battery behavior has been entirely predictable, the whole time I've owned it. I suspect that something about your specific iPhone is hosed.

Battery drain can be a network (misconfiguration) issue, too. Any idea if it drains more or less quickly depending upon your geographic locations?

Not linked to any geographic locations or signal availability.

It happened once last week when I was at home all day, once in the office and once this week in the office.

When at home it is on Wifi all the time, with a lousy 3G signal. When in the office its is on an excellent 3G signal all the time, with no access to Wifi.

I really don't think my issue is about excessive battery drain though.

At 13:00 yesterday it reckoned it had been active/on-standby for over 10.5 hours since the last full charge. That means according to the phone the last full charge had completed at around 02:30. Which is just wrong, it was on charge from 01:00 all the way through to 06:00 and was then back on the car charger from 06:30 until about 07:30.

So when I looked at 13:00 it should have been showing a total usage since the last charge of about 5.5 hours. So it looks to me that the real problem is to do with the phone getting confused and deciding not to recharge the battery even when it can.

Does it show that it's being charged when you have it plugged in or docked or whatever? Maybe there's something wrong with your charger. Did it get swapped out when you exchanged it before?

I don't know what it was showing when it was failing to charge the other night because it was the middle of the night. But no I haven't noticed any indication that is isn't charging, whenever I have looked at the phone when charging it has always had either the "charging" or "plugged in but fully charged" symbols.

Also, it can't be down to that single charger, because two of the days that it failed by lunchtime it also spent over an hour plugged into the car charger, which would normally be enough to take the charge to nearly 100% even if it was low.

In contrast, with exactly the same sort of usage, today I have got to 14:30 and the battery is still at 80%...





...or is it

Here is a list of other things that can affect battery life on the iPhone. I was surprised at some of them.

I still think you've got a hardware problem, since it has that problem where the battery indicator seems to "stick" at 100 percent even when the battery is draining.

I have to say I am not seeing the same problems on my iPhone.

I did however notice whilst in Austria recently, so I have Data Roaming and WiFi etc... turned off, how long the battery lasts without all that stuff turned on!

Generally I find the charge indicator to be pretty good. Maybe it would be worth the Apple Store taking a look at it ???

Cheers

Cris.

I'm beginning to think that it might be the best thing to do. I've been putting it off because as it is such an investment in time and effort.

I either have to travel into London to or round to Bluewater, there is no Apple store nearby. I'd only be able to get to Bluewater at the weekend, so that means a three hour trip whichever store I pick

I wonder if your local o2 store would do a straight swap for you?

Cheers

Cris.

I have no idea. I bought it from Apple rather than from O2.

It doesn't work that way; if power is connected, and the source can be identified (adaptor with the correct ID pins so the phone can determine its current limit - ie any iPod-compatible one, or a host) then the charger is enabled.

Usage only resets on *full* charge - ie, it has to get to something like 98%+ for it to reset the counts.

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers if you didn't plug it in in the car one day - from your description it sounds very much like the exchange activesync server it is talking to is misbehaving in some way and keeping waking the unit. This type of thing is kinda annoying as you don't ever "see" the wakes as they're just server activity, even though firing up the 3G data link is kinda costly, power-wise.

The other thing to try would be disabling the activesync mail account for a day as an experiment...

Hugo
(speaking personally, not for his employer)

Understood, but on that day that we are talking about it was on charge for 5 hours over night (and wasn't particularly low on charge before that). So it should have started the day with a full charge.



Well one of the days that it happened was when I was at home all day, with no car charger involved and also no 3D (just wifi at home).


I was thinking about doing it, but the random nature of this problem makes it kind of difficult to reproduce on demand. In the last two weeks it has only happened on 3 days, so I'd have to turn ActiveSync off for two weeks or more to know whether there was any change

Nuevasync have had other reports in the past of battery problems, but have never been able to repro them themselves. I guess that either means that:

- they really do have battery issues caused by their ActiveSync implementation
- some of their users have battery issues caused by something else

I'd take it in for an exchange, but I'm really not convinced it is a hardware problem.

...or they do have a software problem that they can't replicate. Thing is, for them to wake the unit is just some IP traffic sent at the wrong time, or not responding to the unit they have remotely woken.

tbh, it doesn't sound like a HW problem given it has happened 3 days out of 14 and the other days have been fine. A HW degradation is generally gonna be a lot more repeatable than that (hardware likes to stay broken in general ).

Pity that Nuevasync seem to be fairly opaque... (though that they commented at all is waaay more transparent than Apple!)

Hugo

The other issue, where the battery stays stuck at 100% until you reboot clearly isn't caused by stray IP traffic though. That happened again yesterday and happens once a fortnight or so.

I think I really need to take it back to the apple store. Anyone know in the uk how long after purchase they will keep swapping out ?

I think the swap-out is for the full warranty period? Not sure though. Can you email me your serial number a few days before you do the swap out? I'll see if I can capture the unit, I'm interested in the stuck battery meter symptom.

Hugo

Will do. It is the combination of the two problem that makes it more of an issue.

If I just had the stuck battery meter one, I would at least have some sort of idea when the battery will die based on knowing when I last charged it.

When both problems occur on the same day it is a real killer, when it dies half way through the day even though I've checked the battery meter to see that it is doing ok. I've taken to checking the usage details regularly when I know I'm going to be away from the charger for most of the day...

If you notice it being stuck, a full power cycle (hold top, swipe to off, restart) should really clear it. If it doesn't then that's even more interesting

Hugo

Yes a full power cycle does always clear it. But the problem is by the time you realise it is lying to you the battery is typically dead (when both problems occur on the same day that is).

So it sounds like the battery meter sticking is a known problem ??? Any chance of a fix any time soon ?

And more importantly, is it a software or hardware problem?

I am not 100% sure if this is the same problem as you are seeing Andy, but I noticed last night before I plugged it in to charge, that my battery meter was still showing 100% even after a day of quite heavy use for me. A power cycle dropped the meter down to about 30-40% which is more what I would expect.

Never noticed this before, I have been keeping an eye out I suppose since I saw this post. Not a real big problem for me as I am in the habit of plugging it in every night whatever the charge level.

Cheers

Cris.

Yes Cris, that is exactly what happens in one half of my problem. I charge mine almost every night, but that still doesn't help on the days that the two issues occur together.