There have been a good number of complaints online about the iPhone 4S having poor battery life. Up until this point Apple has stayed silent on the issue. That silence has been broken. The company acknowledged on Wednesday that some users are in fact experiencing "lower than expected battery life" and that the problem wasn't exclusive to the iPhone 4S.
Apple claims that bugs within iOS 5 are causing the problem in a small number of devices. The good news is a fix is coming soon. Apple sent a statement to All Things D that read,
"A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
Apple wouldn't comment further about what the bugs were or how much lower the battery life was for customers experiencing issues.
Complaints about battery life started cropping up shortly after the release of the iPhone 4S and a slew of reports quickly appeared in Apple's official support forum. The thread was over 200 pages as of the writing of this post. Users commented about their specific solutions to help improve the problem, but throughout the entire thread Apple didn't weigh in once.
Ars Technica looked at the battery life themselves and noted in a video playback test that the iPhone 4 saw 12 hours of playback while the iPhone 4S only got 10 hours. Both devices were reportedly running the exact same version of iOS 5. While one report by Ars Technica isn't a definitive account it is interesting that the site saw such performance differences on two phones running the same OS. This is especially interesting considering Apple claims the problem is with iOS 5 and not the iPhone 4S itself.
Did you buy an iPhone 4S? Are you experiencing some of the battery issues that other users are reporting? Let us know about your experience in the comments.
