Shortly after the iPhone 3G was introduced, many new 3G owners discovered that 3G data access used more power than access via the (non-3G) Edge network. However, some people experienced a rapid battery drain that would leave their iPhone at the dreaded 20% “low battery” threshold within hours of a full charge. To many iPhone owners, this phenomenon has a name “Turbo Battery Drain”. About 2 days ago, my iPhone 4 – which had been working perfectly, and for no apparent reason – began turbo draining the battery at an alarming rate. After much ado, I finally found the culprit.
THE MYSTERY
Since I hadn’t changed any settings on my iPhone, I was pretty confident that I hadn’t done anything to cause the issue. I hadn’t installed any apps, hadn’t really done anything noteworthy besides emails, calls, and text messages. Yet it was unmistakable – even while put away, the iPhone was losing about 10% of its charge per hour. Further, the back was warm – as if I had been accessing data or had been on the phone all this time. But I hadn’t – and so I knew some detective work was in the cards.
THE CHASE
First, I tried the obvious – rebooting the phone, just in case an app had gone crazy and was locked in some data-accessing state. However, this did not work. I tried restoring the phone from a backup – nothing. Finally, I began focusing on email.
Email is one app that can be both data intensive and that runs in the background persistently. I first decided to change my mail setting from PUSH to Manual. That immediately caused the turbo drain to cease. By now, I was pretty sure that Mail was the culprit – but in what manner? Why? To Google!
A quick Google search turned up a variety of non-helpful items and a few that looked promising. Amongst them was a suggestion to delete and recreate the mail account. Great – except I have 9 accounts configured! I soon realized that an easier way to see if one of the mail accounts was the culprit would be to disable them all and re-enable them one by one. So I re-enabled Push, and disabled all of the mail accounts except one. No turbo drain! I turned that one off and turned the next one on, and repeated the process until finally I got to my work email account – and suddenly it was back to a 10%/hour drain rate. So now, I knew which account was causing the problem – but was it my phone, my email account, the mail server, or something else?
THE TRIAL
So I re-enabled all of the other accounts and left the work email account disabled to ensure that it was absolutely that account – and it was. Back to the Google results, and one suggestion that stated that I should delete the account, re-create it, and then reboot. Sounded good, so I tried it – no luck. After talking to a few co-workers, I quickly established that I was the only iPhone owner experiencing the problem.
As the day’s activities took me near an Apple Store, on a whim I decided to see if a Genius could figure it out. I made an appointment, and sat down with Jon, who listened to the story and began from that point (which was refreshing, I was treated like I knew a little something about what I was doing!). Jon concluded that I either had an issue with the hardware (and he swapped the phone out on the spot) or some manner of corruption in the mail data files that a restore would simply re-create on the new iPhone if I restored it from backup. He gently nudged me towards the answer I absolutely did not want to hear – that I would have to restore as a new iPhone and re-create everything – installing all 250+ apps again (and losing all the app data – such as which levels I had completed in Angry Birds – don’t mess with my Angry Birds, now). Suddenly that feeling of imminent doom and despair began to overcome me.
THE VERDICT
So back at home, I restored from a backup (I don’t listen so well sometimes) and confirmed that the problem had followed to the new phone.
Finally it hit me – this started happening two days ago – perhaps it was an email that I had received or sent that was gumming up the works for some reason?
So I fired up the laptop, and began cleaning out my work email – saving what I needed, deleting what I didn’t. Then I deleted the account from the iPhone, rebooted it, and recreated the account. Then I waited eagerly to see if I had indeed solved the problem.
I had. Back to a more normal 1% drop every 10 minutes or so.
Whew.
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