I got my iPhone 4S two weeks after it launched. I was on cloud nine and had no remorse giving away my cherished iPhone 4 to a family member. But then the problems started, the worst battery life ever seen on an iPhone.
I started feeling horrible looking at my ex-iPhone 4 going a full day without a charge and my phone felt like it was running on cheap double As.
iOS 5.0.1 brought a ray of hope aiming to solve this mammoth of a problem. However, it made the problem worse, at least for me it did.
Well in all honesty, there was one thing I had not done, restore my new iPhone 4S ‘as a new iPhone’. How could I, I absolutely had to move my digital life from the old to the new.
In order to justify keeping my text messages and my Cut the Rope stars and trophies, I tried everything else I could find on the internet. network resets, disabling raise to speak to Siri, turning off push notifications, turning off push email, you name it.
Well yesterday I snapped, with the help of Chillingo enabling Cut the Rope game progresses to be saved on iCloud, I bought an app called “Tipard iPhone manager for SMS” for $10 and copied my text messages, though you won’t get much functionality with a standard license but it will still give you messages in a text file as well a backup in the software so you can read the messages like you would on the phone itself.
I then finally did the restore, spending the exhaustive time required to hand-pick the 250 apps I wanted on my iPhone out of the 500+ in my iTunes library, and needless to say, the results were astounding.
I still have 80% of my battery with everything turned on (see what I disabled a few paragraphs back) with nominal usage and a good night sleep worth of stand by time.
Concluding this article, it is definitely worth a try to restore your iPhone 4S as a new iPhone if you are facing battery problems even after upgrading to iOS 5.0.1. You could always ‘restore from backup’ if it doesn’t work for you.
For further information, I am aware of the various methods of custom backup and restoring of game data and text messages etc but I personally don’t like jailbreaking anymore.