How's Your iPhone Battery Since That iOS 5 Upgrade?

Todd Ogasawara: I have not seen significant battery life changes since upgrading an iPhone 4 to iOS 5. However, I've seen and continue to see a lot of app problems. Many app crashing issues have been resolved by uninstalling and then reinstalling the problem app. Todd has heard of the decreased battery life problem from others.

Shawn Ingram: I've had no problems with battery on the iPhone 4. Keep in mind, however, that Apple said the iPhone 4S will actually get less standby battery life (200 hours compared to the 4's 300 hours), but will get an extra hour of 3G talk time. (See iPhone specs; iPhone 4 specs) On my iPhone 4 the big problem is app crashing, and it feels slower than before. Then again, I've felt like it's been running slowly for the past few months anyway.

Todd Moore: I love iOS 5 as a consumer. As a developer it has been different. I had to update many of my apps in order to work around bugs in iOS 5. Apple also decided to make a major change to how screen lock works. Now it suspends the application whereas in iOS 2,3,4 it allowed apps to continue running. The reason they apparently did this was to help with battery life. However, in the process they have broken many applications such as alarm clocks. This is pretty bad especially for the iPad that does not include a default alarm application. Seems like a major oversight to me.

I started playing with Find My Friends (very cool but kind of creepy) and it seems to have greatly impacted my battery life. Even if I turn it off under location services. Does anyone else have the location services icon always on? I have to turn off location services completely in order to get rid of the icon. The icon use to just appear when I used location aware apps like Maps but now it appears to be always on even if I log out of Find My Friends.

Chris Spera: I have been using iOS5 on my iPad 1 since the first beta. I have noticed a drop in battery life overall, but not a significant drop. the issues that I've had with apps have been resolved by an update and/or a delete on the device and then reinstall.

Peter Baer Galvin has the following advice for those with battery life or "hot phone" problems:Many folks who have tried the following sets of steps have gotten rid of their battery and heat issues. Some however after this procedure still have the problem. Oddly, anecdotal evidence shows that it might solve the problems when done on black iPhones but not white ones! It's difficult to pin details like that down.

1. Reset your network settings via settings -> general -> reset ->reset network settings
2. Perform a hard-reboot the phone (the method depends on the phone either hold power and home button for longer than 10 seconds, or just the power button for longer than 10 seconds).

Peter also doesn't have Todd's problem of the Location Services icon sticking around after it's not needed.

What's new in iOS 5? Click here to see Byte's David Martin go through the new features 1 by 1.