There has been a reported increase in iPhone issues related to battery life and overheating. All of the reports seem to be from users who upgraded their devices to iOS 6.1.
TNW:
A quick search on the Apple Support Communities forum for iOS 6.1 battery shows this is not an isolated problem. Apple released iOS 6.1 on January 28. It appears some users have been having problems ever since they’ve upgraded: complaints have been coming in from that date all the way till today.
The earliest found report was on January 28, and ironically comes form a user reporting his great battery life on his iPhone 5. The first reply however, is from another iPhone 5 user who is “Seeing the exact opposite” and the thread goes downhill from there.
Another 16 page thread began on January 29th, and a third on February 4th. All of these threads have a majority of their replies coming in today February 8th.
There is a thread that was started on January 29th that contains the closest thing yet to a solution:
I went to see the genius’ yesterday. My problem was that my usage was almost identical to my stand by times, which means that something was continuing to run in the background after closing all the apps. I was told to turn off location services and then one by one turn each in turn to see which one was causing the drain on the battery. I was impatient so just factory reset the handset which seems to have fixed the problem.
I’ll keep you all posted on how it continues.
One possible theory links the problem with Apple Mail and Microsoft Exchange. Apparently iOS 6.1 can throw up malformed meetings, which can cause a device to get into a sync loop which in turn causes excessive transaction log growth on Exchange mailbox servers. This then leads to Exchange performance issues and transaction log drives can potentially run out of disk space.
If the two are indeed related, it would explain why some users are having the problem and others aren’t. Not everyone connects their iPhone to an Exchange server. TNW says a temporary fix is available at DevCentral.
As has happened in the past, it’s very likely that these issues will be fixed in a future update.
How about our readers? Have any of you noticed overheating or a decrease in battery life since updating to iOS 6.1? Please share your experiences, good or bad, in the comments section below.
Curious. I haven’t experienced this issue, my battery life is still very good and I am connected to Exchange 2010 for work. I can test though by temporarily removing the account, charging, and seeing what the difference in time is.
I have 2 ipads… I can assure overheating and decrease in battery life since updating to iOS 6.1 in my new iPad. By other hand the iPad 2 with iOS 6.01 remains as usual. Im gonna try to unninstall my exchange account and see the result. Thx!
iPhone 4S battery life and performance plummeted since downloading iOS 6.1.
Overheat and hot battery began a few days before iOS 6.1 update. Did a reset on the settings then turned them on one by one. Fixed the overheating and drain problem. Back to normal operation now.
I don’t know about overheat but yes battery life has been decreased badly, especially when you’re using cellular data , your battery will fall 1 percent in approx 2 or 2 and a half mins.
I was wondering why my battery was draining so quickly lately.
Yes, overheating, battery drain (unless I have flight mode on) and no network!
It’s totally out of order for Apple representatives to tell us to turn off ‘location services’ and other similar features & to tell us to restore/reset our settings!
I don’t buy a car for my dealership to then tell me not to put it in fifth gear.
But the most annoying thing here is that Apple hasn’t stepped forward and apologised at all! They’ve just sat back and filed us under ‘cannon fodder’ :/
My iPhone 4S has this heating and battery drain problem since iOS 6.01. it always occurs when it changes carrier provider automatically. Remedy eject and reinsert the SIM card.
I have Exchange and a definite freefall of battery life after upgrade.
Yes, battery drain on my iPad 3 and my iPhone 5 since the Os change. Was wondering if it was just my mind doing tricks, but last friday i simply had to stop working on the iPad because i was getting to 1%. So…
While there is slower battery drain with my exchange account removed it’s not of the sheer magnitude that this is being made out to be. Both my iPad2 and my iPhone 5 have never over heated, nor did my iPhone 4 before that. I suspect that while this is a real issue it’s once again something very much blown out of proportion.