As an owner of a brand new iPhone 4s, I noted the crappy battery life compared to previous versions of the phone. The UK Guardian brought the story to light with a few suggestions of fixing the issue, from turning off location services, specifically turning off the “Setting Time Zone” feature in location services.

As an Apple developer I feel a sense of duty to get to the bottom of this and after an afternoon of fiddling around the issue is a real simple fix.

  1. First use your iPhone 4s until the battery is completely depleted and shuts off.

  2. Plug in your charger and charge the iPhone until it’s back to 100%

Doing so fixed the issue on my iPhone 4s. Subsequent usage is more within the 200 hour standby spec Apple cites. I’ve communicated with Apple about this. They will test the fix and I and expect them to issue a support article soon.