Fix to Resolve Poor Battery Life Issue After Upgrading to iPhone Firmware 2.2

July 2009

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We have already seen some issues reported by users after upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.2 which was released by Apple on Nov 21 and workarounds to fix them here and here.

Based on some complaints from readers here at iPhone Hacks and discussion threads over at Apple forums it appears that some users have observed that their iPhone battery is draining much faster after upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.2.

One of our readers, Joe, had reported:

My battery life is about 50% of what it was with ver 2.1. I'm pretty upset with the situation.

Chris also complained about a similar problem with his iPhone's battery life after upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.2:

With 2.2 my battery life has decreased from 1 day 12 hours between charges to about 9 hours between charges. My phone usage patterns have not changed. The phone is usually on standby (I don't play music through it, surf the web, etc. I do check email once in a while.)

Damian also had a similar complaint:

"I have noticed battery life has halved since moving to 2.2 from 2.1 and I havent changed anything else!"

There are similar issues reported by iPhone users at Apple forums here and here.

A few iPhone users who faced this problem have been able to successfully resolve it by deleting the push-capable mail account/accounts such as Exchange, MobileMe (Settings-> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> (Account name) -> Delete Account) and setting them all over again. Apparently the update locks such mail accounts into a constant ‘on’ state, resulting in an endlessly search for mail, rather than waiting for the mail to be ‘pushed’ which is resulting in draining the iPhone's battery life.

If that does not work, you can also try to turn off the push functionality (Settings -> Fetch New Data -> Push) and restart your iPhone and then turn push functionality on.

Turn off Location services:

Some other workarounds based on previous experience is to turn off location services. It appears that the Google Maps application and some third-party applications that use GPS functionality fail to power down the necessary hardware components when they are no longer in use. Navigate to Settings -> and turn these services off when you are not using Maps or another location-aware third-party iPhone apps.

If you are looking to optimize on your iPhone's battery life then we recommend you to read the tips posted by Apple here. Ironically one of the their tips is to update to the latest software.

Let us know if the workarounds helped or if you have figured out some other way to fix the issue.

[via iPhone Atlas, TheiPhoneBlog]

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