Tips to Keep Apple's iPhone 4S Battery from Draining Fast

Apple iPhone 4S users worried about the device’s battery draining rapidly can take steps to prevent the problem.

Here’s a rundown of what may be causing the problem and how you can fix it.

It appears that the location services system in iOS 5 is one issue that has something to do with it.
A growing number of people have found that the "Setting Time Zone" element within Location Services in iOS seems to be operating when it doesn’t need to be, resulting in excessive battery drain.

To stop that from happening, go to Settings > Location Services > System Services. From there, it’s just a matter of turning off “Setting Time Zone.”

Switching it off may mean that your iPhone will no longer set its own time zone when you travel, but that’s a small price to pay for dramatically increasing the life of your iPhone charge, notes iDownload, which tested this method on several iPhones, including the 4s, iPhone 4, and an iPhone 3GS, all of which demonstrated drastically improved battery life after making the change.

So far Apple hasn’t commented on the issue but The Guardian reported on Friday that its engineers have begun contacting some people who have been reporting exceptionally rapid battery depletion.
The time zone setting might not be the only problem.

Macworld found that contact syncing within iCloud also increased battery drain. In that case, wiping the phone and then syncing via iCloud solved the problem.

A PCWorld reader had a similar problem with a new iPhone 4S and took it to an Apple store. An employee ran a diagnostics check on the device. He stated that the process that allows the cellular connection was in a constant crash reboot state and it was eating the battery. The employee wiped the phone and asked the user to not restore from backup but to just do a sync to the device. After performing these steps, the phone has performed well.