[ghshephard]

Battery life on my Iphone 4 (4.0(8A293)) is so bad that I frequently have a brick in my hands. That was never the case with the 3GS.

Now, If I reboot the iPhone, and don't use it for anything other than making a few phone calls - I can go two, sometimes three days without needing a recharge.

But, if I use a few apps, Maps, Email, etc.. I typically either wake up in the morning, or end the day with a dead phone.

So, this is clearly not a battery problem - as it is related to App usage. I try to shut-down all my apps every time I use them, and keep the screen locked (and dim), but that isn't working (or I'm not as good at is as I'd like to be)

The one thing that does seem to work, repeatedly, is rebooting the iPhone every time I use a few Apps (and then not touching the Apps).

This is the first iPhone I've had battery problems with - it's clearly something running in the background that I'm not aware of. Eventually I'll figure it out - but anything Apple can provide to me in terms of "What is sucking battery life" would be much appreciated - so - your suggestion that the GPS arrow changes color to indicate that they are draining the battery, would be a huge win.

Even better, would be a screen that would show me which apps were pulling how much battery throughout the day.

And yes, I realize Apple does NOT want to take that approach (feels more androidish/windows mobile) - they want to make a phone that "just works" - but my position is, until they make that phone, i want them to give me the tools so _I_ can make it work in absence of a phone that is "Just working", yet.

[albertzeyer]

Some applications seem to restart themselves automatically in the background. Even when you kill them (via jailbreak tools), they restart themselves. I had that problem with Skype. Those jailbreak tools also seem to be the only way to see what really is running right now in the background. Deleting Skype seemed the only solution so far (without much further hacking).

[aaronblohowiak]

Check your mail settings.

[ghshephard]

Absolutely - the very first thing I did was disable every automatic mail setting. It's 100% manual now.

The key data point is that a _reboot_ of the phone, and then doing nothing but making phone calls, results in pretty good battery life for three (sometimes four) days.

But, I'm frequently tempted to click on some apps (zillow, maps, safari) - and then, if I don't reboot the phone, I'm down to 0% within a maximum of 16 hours, regardless of how careful I close all of my apps with the backgrounder tool.

I love my iPhone so much, that this is more interesting than upsetting. But I'd _really_ love to know what, precisely, is pulling the battery down.

[thought_alarm]

If you think it's related to GPS you can turn off Location Services to see if it makes a difference.

However, I would guess it's related to network usage.