A few days ago I finally joined the 21st century fully: I got an iPhone, specifically the iPhone 4S. When the box arrived on my doorstep containing the vaunted Jesus Phone last Thursday, I felt, well, whole. After all, I’m an Apple fan boy — my house is filled with Apple products: an iPad, a Macbook, a Macbook Pro, an old iBook, an iPod classic, an iPod touch. But I held out on the iPhone, for two reasons — my seething, white-hot hatred for AT&T and my fondness for the Blackberry. But when Sprint recently began offering iPhones just as Blackberry started circling the drain, I made the leap.
So, needless to say, I was geeked to get the 4S. But when I finally got it activated around mid-morning on Saturday I discovered that by 3pm the battery had less than a 10% charge — before I had even begun loading it up with apps or had made a single call — and I was all, “WTF?!” Since then I’ve had to charge my iPhone at least twice each day as it typically is completely drained by mid/late afternoon.
Now today Apple has confirmed what I and others already knew: that they have a serious iPhone 4S battery issue on their hands.
Apple said in a statement: “A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
Some iPhone users have complained that the battery on their handset drains in less than half a day – far more quickly than is normal. Turning off some of the device’s location settings fixes the problem in some cases. However, this does not seem to improve performance for all users, suggesting, as Apple says, that more than one bug is involved.
I’m gonna go ahead and call bullsh*t on the “small number of customers” thing as every single person I know with a 4S is experiencing the same issue. The ones Apple hasn’t received complaints from are the ones who haven’t called in or visited an Apple Store yet. Just get it fixed.
On the bright side, Siri is amazing!