iPhone battery problems may persist with iOS 5.1

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This article, and the discussions ignore one, potentially obvious issue. Third party apps. My wife's 4s on 5.0.1 gets 2 1/2 to 3 days between charges with moderate use. Since the 4s, she no longer uses her Air so plenty of time on wifi. My son's 4 has the same battery life on 5.0.1 as he did on any of the iOS 4 variants.

Both of us have noticed that no matter how many times we turn off location services for one news app, it's back on the next time we use the app. It got deleted. How many other third party apps are causing the problem?

Matt R: I've never had an iMessage fail on three devices. While Safari is not great, it does not crash on our 4s and did at first on my 1st iPad until I restored it as a new iPad and modified some setting that are unique for the older iPad. Something no one can say for any of the third party browsers which are crippled with inadequate memory allocations. Using 4G has nothing to do with the cities you are in. If you download massive files, its nice. Not too many of us will ever make use of 4G on a cell phone. However, perhaps go Android. My wife started out there with a first gen Droid. It lasted less than a year before she got the 4s and she's delighted to be rid of it. I certainly am as maintaining it was a pita in our Apple centric home.

It sounds like you can either continue to be displeased or spend a little time restoring from DFU mode.

Turn wifi off and your battery is fine. With wifi enabled my usage stats are way off.

Matt: Wireless synch works just fine. Connect the phone to your system via cable and do one sync. It will show up in iTunes. Don't click on the 'eject' button; just leave it there. Unplug the phone from the computer. Now, without the phone be connected to anything, either use the sync on the phone itself in Settings > General or click on the device in iTunes and click on Sync from the Summary tab.

I don't buy the excuses about iCloud, notifications, location awareness, etc. causing the slowdown. I have an iPhone 4 (not 4S) and have everything turned on and have noticed no change in battery life whatsoever. This seems to be something software related to only the 4S.

Post script: There is almost nothing about iOS 5 that has made the aggravation worth it. I didn't realize that "wireless" sync meant your device needs to be connected to a power source. How is that wireless? It's more convenient to connect my iPhone to my laptop rather than walking across the room and looking for an open outlet.

The camera updates are mostly fiddling around the edges (I mean the iPhone 4 camera software, not the hardware camera on the 4S). The native mail app is as atrocious as ever. iMessage fails as often as it succeeds. So many messages don't go through even when they're marked as "delivered" that some of my main contacts and me have turned it off completely. Would you rather have your messages get there faster and in some cases not count against your SMS limit, or would you rather have confidence that your message was actually received? That's a no-brainer for me.

Mobile Safari is still pretty much a joke compared to third-party apps like Atomic Web Browser (although I like Reader). And whether this is connected to iOS 5 or not, Safari on my iPad is the crashiest it has ever been. Even if I have only one or two tabs open, it will inevitably crash midway through reading a couple of news articles.

And while not related specifically to iOS 5 (and sorry if this is O/T), I can't believe that the competition is so far ahead when it comes to 4G. I spend almost all of my time in cities that actually have 4G, so it's a feature that would be quite useful to me.

I own about nine or 10 Apple products that cost $100 or more and many others that cost less (such as additional earphones, Bumpers, etc.), and for the first time I'm considering bailing in favor of Android. While Android has a lot of problems of its own, it's making enough progress that I'm now giving it a second look.

Tim Cook, pay attention!

I have an iPhone 4. I upgraded to iOS 5, and battery life was noticeably and DRAMATICALLY reduced. The update to 5.0.1 didn't help at all and may have actually made matters worse. In the past, during average daily use, my battery would drain to about 80 or 75 percent. Now, if I don't charge, it inevitably drops to the 50 percent range.

I had a heavier than average usage day this week, and it dropped nearly to 30 percent! And this even included two hours on a plane when it was completely powered down. (No, I didn't accidentally leave it on.)

On the other hand, my iPad battery doesn't seem as badly impacted, but I don't normally use it nearly as much as my iPhone.

If it's a software issue, doesn't that suggest that the 4 and 3Gs should be affected as well?

Maybe, with all this new demand for mobile power supplies, someone will develop an effective solar solution.

I had severe battery drain issues with my iPhone 4S, even after upgrading to 5.01. I read many blog posts and potential solutions from playing with Notifications to turning off almost everything except the phone. I tried restoring the phone from scratch...didn't work. However, after restoring the phone from DFU mode to 5.01 about 2 weeks ago, my battery life is great. I have everything on...WiFi, bluetooth, notifications, etc.
I use my phone to check emails, twitter, the news, and make calls. I go home and my battery is at ~50% around 6:30PM after using it all day (from 8:30AM).

I believe the trick was restoring it while in DFU mode...I have several friends that have done the same with similar results.