iPhone battery life woes

25Jan11

I have an iPhone 3GS that is coming up on 2 years old. I keep it up to date and it currently has iOS 4.2.1 installed.

About two weeks ago it started getting very warm and the battery charge would only last about 5 hours. Initially I thought it was a program running in the background that was going crazy. So I rebooted by holding down the Home and Sleep buttons until the screen went blank and then restarted. Same thing continued to happen. Next I made sure I had a current backup in iTunes and then did a Reset / Erase All Content and Settings on the phone. Then, I did a restore from the backup. Same thing. The phone would get very warm and the battery charge would only last 5 hours.

So, I decided to try the battery. I didn’t want to pay Apple $79.00 + $6.95 S&H to change the battery when there was no guarantee this would fix it. So, I researched and purchased a battery and tools from http://www.directfix.com. I chose them because they have taken the time to produce PDF instruction sheets and videos stepping you through the process.

The parts arrived very quickly (2 days) and I successfully replaced the battery and powered the phone back on. Same thing – warm and 5 hours battery life

The only thing left to try was to erase the phone and then reinstall all of the applications and settings manually, not using a backup. So, on the phone I did a Reset / Erase All Content and Settings. Then, I hooked up to iTunes and selected Setup as a new iPhone and went through the process of configuring the sync options and reloading all of my apps, music, email etc. and setting up the application settings.

Thankfully, this fixed the issues. My iPhone is now working as expected; it no longer gets warm and the battery has great life.

Could my phone have become infected with a virus? Or did something trip a bug in iOS? I just hope it wasn’t a virus but I am changing all of my passwords just in case.

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Tags: battery, hot, iphone, warm