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Ok, as we all have heard, the iPhone 4S on 5.0 had some reported battery issues where the battery was simply draining faster and not delivering on the advertised performance ratings that Apple was giving. Apple acknowledged the issue and released iOS 5.0.1 which was supposed to fix the battery issue. For some it did, for some it made it better and for some it stayed the same.

Some of the remedies included turning off all kinds of system services, such as iCloud, Location, etc. However, I feel these may have just been a placebo, and people still had the issues.

Recently, a website had run an experiment in which they had two iPhone 4S’, one that apparently had the battery issue and one that did not. You can read about that here.

What the site does not say was whether or not they had restored one phone with a backup from a 4S or 4 and left the 4S alone on 5.0.1.

In my experience, when I received my iPhone 4S, I had immediately logged into iCloud on the device, backed up my iPhone 4 on 5.0.1 to iCloud and restored to the 5.0 4S immediately. I noticed that I had the speedy battery drain. So I then upgraded to 5.0.1, and I still had the battery drain.

I then started turning off services as usual, to no avail. I was frustrated.

Then it occured to me that I was using an iPhone 4 backup on a 4S. It occured to me as well that the 4 was essentially a very different beast from the 4S. Apple has lots of settings that the user can’t access that pertain to hardware, and they usually do get backed up as well.

It’s very possible that restoring a 4 backup on a 4S causes the battery drain from the old hardware settings. To test, I did a pristine restore via iTunes, did not restore any settings, and did a clean sync to iTunes and set everything back up by hand. The results are very good. The battery has greatly improved. At the time of this post, I had the iPhone 4S fully charged and taken off the charger at 12pm sharp. It is now 4:43pm and with moderate usage the stats are as follows:

 

 

I’d say those are pretty impressive stats. If all else fails, start clean, give it a shot.