Ever since iOS 5 was released, users have complained of reduced battery life on their iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.  Last week I posted an article with a few handy hints about generally improving battery life on your phone, and hopefully some of them paid off.  However, if you’re like me they only helped out a little, but standby remained below that of iOS 4.

Since then I’ve tried something else which made a big difference to my iPhone 4 running iOS 5′s battery life.  With a fully charged battery it now loses less than 10% overnight, whereas before the phone would drop at least 30%.  This magic fix may not work for everyone, but it made all the difference for me.

Here’s what I did:

• Go to Settings, then General.
• Scroll down to Date & Time.
• If Set Automatically is switched on, turn it off.

That’s it!  This adjustment along with the Automatic Time Zone selection switched off under Location Services saw my iPhone 4 back to almost normal.  Seeing as there hasn’t been any firmware updates, nor has my phone usage changed, I can only put it down to the above alteration.

Wonderful!  Except that it’s not, as to get anything approaching an acceptable standby time, iCloud has to be turned off too.  Yep, I don’t dare use one of the much-vaunted new features of iOS 5 because it’s too battery intensive.

What’s interesting about the whole battery/iPhone 4S issue is certain media comparing it to last year’s antenna problem.  I don’t see the similarity really, as the battery drain is almost certainly software related rather than hardware, requiring plenty of research from Apple’s team of engineers to cure rather than a free case.

Saying this, just like the iPhone 4′s reception woes, not every user seems to be experiencing subpar standby time.  PCMag performed a battery drain test using an iPhone 4 and 4S running iOS 5 and an iPhone 4 running iOS 4, each sitting in standby, and they all returned a very similar time of around 7 hours.

Whatever the cause turns out to be, let’s hope iOS 5.1 is the cure.