Temporary Fix – iPhone Battery Drain after iOS 5 Upgrade

There’s been a lot of reports regarding poor battery life on iPhone’s after upgrading to iOS 5, I’ve got the problem on my 3GS, I can’t even get a full day at the moment! This fix applies to all iPhones not just the 4s, it probably applies to 3G iPads too but that’s not been confirmed yet.

It appears that there’s a bug in iOS 5 that’s keeping location services turned on for automatically setting your time zone when there’s absolutely no reason to. Location Services consume a large amount of battery life due to it using a combination of WiFi, Mast Data Requests and GPS to work out where you are, having these services constantly running can drain your battery in hours.

To check if this is your problem, follow these instructions: –

1. Open the ‘Settings’ App
2. Select ‘Location Services’
3. Scroll to the bottom of the list and Select ‘System Services’
4. If you’ve got a purple arrow next to ‘Setting Time Zone’ then your constantly using Location Services
5. Turn off ‘Setting Time Zone’
6. OPTIONAL: You can also turn off Diagnostics & Usage, this simply reports usage data up to Apple

UPDATE 3rd Nov 2011

It appears Apple have just released iOS 5.01 to developers for testing, they’ve also admitted there is indeed a battery problem caused by several bugs in iOS 5. No word on a release date yet but expect it to be in the next couple of weeks if previous release schedules are anything to go by.

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