********** The all new "Official" iPhone 4S thread - Keep all the iPhone 4S stuff in here **********

v0n said:
Well... could be worse. I am not a happy bunny about battery life...
4sbattery.jpg
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Doing what exactly? That is awful, but it does obviously depend on what you were doing. For example I could run tomtom and that wouldn't last an hour.
 
I had I look at the 4S, my thoughts ...

Siri is "cool" to show of one or twice, but the fact that I have to press buttons and be forced to operate in an almost-real-time mode will make me feel like I am living a slide show. For example, I am about to sleep and I am already in bed but I forgot to set my alarm. Phone is sitting on the side table. I have to unlock and press the button to get Siri going, therefore I may as well set it manually. Fail. I am sure they will perfect it with the next iteration.

I can see Siri being useful when driving to avoid the ticket but then again you need to fiddle with the phone. Is it that difficult to recognise a voice? Not really, but it would mean battery life would go down to 2 hours probably as the phone will have to probe and "look for" your sound waves. They need to improve battery tech ASAP otherwise smartphone software development will hit a wall.

Great new product for people who love latest tech/gadgets and have disposable income to afford it. But for the people looking for value-for-money the price is a bit steep I think. You are effectively paying for an additional core (that is used to make Siri respond within reason) and Beta natural language recognition software.
 
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drak3 said:
I had I look at the 4S, my thoughts ...

Siri is "cool" to show of one or twice, but the fact that I have to press buttons and be forced to operate in an almost-real-time mode will make me feel like I am living a slide show. For example, I am about to sleep and I am already in bed but I forgot to set my alarm. Phone is sitting on the side table. I have to unlock and press the button to get Siri going, therefore I may as well set it manually. Fail. I am sure they will perfect it with the next iteration.

I can see Siri being useful when driving to avoid the ticket but then again you need to fiddle with the phone. Is it that difficult to recognise a voice? Not really, but it would mean battery life would go down to 2 hours probably as the phone will have to probe and "look for" your sound waves. They need to improve battery tech ASAP otherwise smartphone software development will hit a wall.
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Yeah but as you said imagine if it was constantly waiting till someone said 'Siri' to get it activated. And someone might say it and it turns on anyway, not exactly functional. Battery life would be a huge issue.

As for the in bed scenario, I set my alarm last night using Siri, found it easy then finding the folder which Clock is in and setting it manually. "Set alarm for 5am on Saturday" "yes" and done. Just took mine off charge after the hard reset and 0-100% charge.
 
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dannyjo22 said:
So all you had transferred from your old iphone was contacts? Sorry I'm new to getting a replacement phone and I'm curious as to what steps you took exactly to get the data onto your new one :)
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I already had MobileMe (which is now iCloud), so when I got the phone I just configured it through iTunes as a new phone, put in my MobileMe account details and it downloaded my Contacts, Calender, Mail and bookmarks automagically.

I then sync the phone with iTunes to put my music, podcasts, photos and apps on.

After that is done I'll mess with all the settings to get the phone to how I want, before a final sync. Job done.


RE: Battery life

So far the only real, idenitfyable culprit for battery-rape is the bug in "Setting time zone", as it constantly uses the GPS.

Things like bluetooth, iCloud, Wi-Fi etc are obvious negatives, but you shouldn't have to turn them off to get over 1 day standby with little usage.
 
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drak3 said:
I had I look at the 4S, my thoughts ...

I can see Siri being useful when driving to avoid the ticket but then again you need to fiddle with the phone. Is it that difficult to recognise a voice? Not really, but it would mean battery life would go down to 2 hours probably as the phone will have to probe and "look for" your sound waves. They need to improve battery tech ASAP otherwise smartphone software development will hit a wall.
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Well. I used vlingo on android before I got 4S and despite the fact vlingo was really buggy, it had one massive advantage over Siri - it could recognize the mode - so in car mode, when on charger, cradle or magnetic field - it had a listen mode with custom voice trigger - I'd say "Hey Vlingo" and it would do the whole Siri-like "What would you like to do?". In that mode as well - text reader was a standard option open at all times - it wouldn't show me answers - like wolfram alpha - it would read them to me, as well as all incoming messages - by default.

As I said - vlingo software was nowhere near as good as Siri is at picking up questions from regular conversation and with background noise, it was absolutely horrible, BUT, that one small thing - the "listening mode" when on charger/cradle makes Siri look like a half baked yankee beta software. I don't think Apple understands it's illegal in most countries to even touch your sat nav/phone when travelling 120mph on autobahn, let alone start repeatedly pressing buttons, putting phone to your face or reading stuff on small screen. And just like "I can only look up businesses in United States" is not acceptable answer to several millions of us who spent £500 on what turned out to be not much more than a cafeteria novelty feature for 15 minytes, someone at Apple or Siri, didn't research the safety aspect fully. It's a small change, really easy to do, it could be done before launch for all european models, but instead I'm just waiting for lawsuits to start.
 
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So after my restore and fresh start this morning.

64 %

Usage 4 hrs 4 mins
Standby 6 hrs 38 mins.

Something is using it a lot, I haven't used the phone for 4 hours today, this is draining my battery.
 
Nick1881 said:
So after my restore and fresh start this morning.

64 %

Usage 4 hrs 4 mins
Standby 6 hrs 38 mins.

Something is using it a lot, I haven't used the phone for 4 hours today, this is draining my battery.
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It must be some kind of background app somewhere or a software/OS issue.

Hopefully it's fixable with a software update.
 
Kol said:
Doing what exactly? That is awful, but it does obviously depend on what you were doing. For example I could run tomtom and that wouldn't last an hour.
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Long phone conversation, browsing the forum, and literally flicking through demo edition of photo magazine in newsstand.

I let it run to the end, switch itself off, then left it on charger overnight, over 8 hours. Took it off the charger this afternoon, and I'm still not a very happy bunny:
4sbat2.jpg


Notifications off, wifi off, time zone stuff off, bluetooth off, no automatic sync services, siri on but "rise to speak" off, all applications closed down last night, the phone is on the same table, in the same house, 5 bars 3G coverage. It's my first iphone, so it wasn't restored, fresh installation, brand new phone.
I answered one call for 3 minutes and took this snapshot, had two unexplained notifications on the screen (as I described in previous post, despite notifications being off for all bar phone, messages, reminders and calendar). I can promise you beyond any doubt I did not use the phone for 20 minutes, so something under the skin there is working and working hard eating battery like nuts.

By the time I finished typing this, I woke up the phone and the battery is now down to 82% and usage up to 27 minutes, and all I did was send the screenshot and enter usage menu. 15-20% down in 4.5 hours, it looks like the phone won't make it through 24 hours in stand by mode practically just sitting and resting on the table.
The trouble of course is - I don't really want to be switching data off, bluetooth off, locations off either - it's not why I bough smartphone.
 
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v0n said:
By the time I finished typing this, I woke up the phone and the battery is now down to 82% and usage up to 27 minutes, and all I did was send the screenshot and enter usage menu. 15-20% down in 4.5 hours, it looks like the phone won't make it through 24 hours in stand by mode practically just sitting and resting on the table.
The trouble of course is - I don't really want to be switching data off, bluetooth off, locations off either - it's not why I bough smartphone.
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This seems like a common problem at the moment.
What's the point in a smartphone if you have to turn everything off and leave it lying on a table to have it's battery last a day.

Rather disappointing really.
 
So after a restore and a hard reset battery seems much better, a bit too early to tell tbh, but i will keep an eye on it over the course of the week. but first impressions are good.....
 
Well I've tried the hard reset thing and it doesn't seem to have made much difference.

Can someone explain the restore thing to me please? I'm an iPhone noob as this is the first one I've had - are we talking about resetting and restoring the whole phone from an iTunes backup or resetting and configuring it all again from scratch?
 
FWIW, now at 19% battery with 4h14m usage and 1d1h standby. That's with WiFi enabled and active for 90% of the time, bluetooth enabled, all unnecessary location services disabled, Exchange push email configured, tons of facebook and a few G+ notifications...
 
1%
Usage: 7hrs 38mins
Standby: 1Day 21hrs

I've been abusing it the last few hours. I reckon 3 days standby is possible with minimal web browsing.
 
Raptor said:
After a hard reset things have improved slightly.

61%
Usage 1hr, 6 mins
Standby 5hrs, 21 mins

Going to have to try a restore next.
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Well after the restore, what an improvement......!

60%
Usage 2hr, 42 mins
Standby 19hrs, 6mins

Looking much better, I will run it down to zero and see how it goes this week.
 
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