Apple Thoughts: iOS 4 - Battery Vampire?

"I upgraded my factory-unlocked iPhone 3GS to iOS 4 just prior to leaving on a six-day trip to British Columbia. My service provider in the US is T-Mobile, and I expected to use Rogers without a problem in Canada. Well, I was in for a rude surprise ..."

Having no data plan with Rogers while in Vancouver, I was prepared to use wi-fi whenever possible, with the expectation that it (wi-fi) would impact battery life no more than it did on v3.1.3. Was I wrong! Using about ten minutes of wi-fi dropped the battery to about 90%, and that was just emailing. Another five minutes of light browsing dropped it another five percent. Something just felt different (wrong) about iOS 4.

I began tinkering with the OS, and decided that I'd see just what was running in the background, or more accurately suspended, did the magic keystrokes to get inside, and discovered several dozen things sitting there idle. Killing them one after another, I got everything stopped, and then went back to my home screen. Now it was down to 80% battery remaining. So something was definitely draining the battery.

Back home, and time for some research. PC World reports that users are complaining (link) that battery life is now half, or less of what it was prior to the upgrade. One user reported losing 1% of battery life every 2 minutes with only iOS 4 running. So I wasn't just imagining this. It has been reported to Apple, and their tech Support forums now have another issue to hash around. As a long-time IT guy, I should know that a DOT ZERO version can buggy. Now we wait for the first set of fixes.