Apple has been struggling with battery issues on the iPhone ever since the major update to its mobile OS (iOS 5) came out last year. While we also believe that Macbooks have lost some battery life after the OS X Lion upgrade, lets focus on iPhone and iOS 5. With iOS 5 Apple added a new notifications center and also started to show notifications on the home screen, on the hardware front iPhone 4S got a faster processor and better camera, thus increasing Apple’s challenges on the battery front. However, the blame so far is on iOS 5 and not the iPhone 4S hardware (if we note, the standby time of iPhone 4S is lower than iPhone 4).
However as it seems now, the battery life issues might have been a result of a missing option in the iPhone 4S. Apparently there was no 3G toggle in iPhone 4S thus not allowing users to manually shut down 3G. Almost every iPhone battery life saving guide would tell you to toggle 3G and WiFi off when not in use to save battery life, since the 4S had no 3G toggle so far, one couldn’t exercise the option to switch it off.
iOS 5.0.1 was said to improve battery life for iPhone users, but the same doesn’t seem to have worked. However a good news currently is the fact that iOS 5.1 would bring back the 3G toggle for iPhone 4S users. Beta 3 of the iOS 5.1 that is out to developers has the 3G toggle again. Apart from this there are some rumors of Siri coming to iPod touch and iPad, but the same might not happen before iPod touch 5th gen and iPad 3rd gen go on sale!