iOS 5 Upgrade: Massive Battery Drain and Crashing Phone App

Question

I upgraded to iOS 5 a few days ago. Although the installtion was a bit bumpy, everything completed successfully. However, since the upgrade, the following symptoms have occurred:

1. Phone battery life dropped dramatically. Locked handset warms up while the battery life drops by 30% per hour.
2. The Phone app closes as soon as it's opened. Calls can still be made via Contacts, but hanging up or using keypad tones is virtually impossible.

Actions Taken So Far: 1. Deactivated every location service, syncronisation, ping setting, and push notification I can find. No difference. 2. Deleted my iCloud account. No difference. 3. performed two complete restores. No difference. 3. Switched off Mobile Data. Success: battery life and Phone app restored! Although renders the 'smartphone' pretty useless.

Question: Does anyone else have this combination of problems since upgrade, or have any suggestions to help me. I'm visiting the Apple Store at the weekend and will look forward to being reminded that my warranty is 6 days out of date.

Answer 1

Turn off Wi-Fi Sync.

I did it and voilá!

It seems that iPhone is constantly looking for an iTunes and tries to connect to it permanently. In fact If I had WI-FI Sync on, iPhone would appear on iTunes for a couple of seconds and then disappear.

To turn it off just plug your iPhone to your computer, open iTunes, click on your iPhone on the left bar and uncheck Wi-Fi Sync.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I have updated to iOS 5 & have unusual battery drain problem. After trying many setting my impression is - the cellular data transfer may be the culprit. Things improve a lot when turn it off.

Answer 3

Further to the problems I raised in my original question, I may have stumbled on a fix. After another unsuccessful full restore, I decided to run a final Erase All Content and Settings. However, this time I decided not to restore the phone but instead activate it as a new user. After completing the setup, the phone did a lot of internal processing then launched perfectly as a new handset. This confirmed to me that something about my original profile was causing the problems. So, I then restored the phone to my original profile to discover it working perfectly still! I've slowly reactivated all my data settings and as yet, no problems.

I'm left wondering if the core Operating System is quite heavily partitioned from much of the other utilities and applications in the user's profile. Perhaps a corruption in my downloaded iOS 5 could not be resolved by restoring my profile in and out, but instead resolved by the process of creating a new user. Then when my original profile was restored against the repaired operating system, everything worked fine.

Anyway, so far so good.

Answer 4

I have used Clean Install on my 3GS and problem is solved. Clean Install in this case means that I didn't restore backup settings after updating to iOS 5 but reconfigured everything from scratch.