So on the day I posted that last update on my battery situation, I tested the phone again with the aforementioned settings, basically turning off everything that makes iOS 7 different. Amazingly, I got four hours mixed use out of the first 40% of battery life. But then it dropped another 20% in the ensuing hour. I then put the phone in airplane mode, turned wi-fi back on, and got another two hours’ use out of it, for a total of seven hours…and then, with 9% showing on the battery, the phone died. So seven hours of use, two of which were with no cellular at all and two more of which were nothing but audio playback. Not good, especially when this same phone would turn in 9 hours of mixed use with almost constant audio in the past.
A trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar revealed a number of crashing apps, including system processes. It also showed a battery on the borderline of requiring a replacement, enough so that they flagged it for replacement if the problems continue irrespective of warranty status. Well done Apple. At that point, they wiped the phone completely and imaged it in full-on restore mode, and I set it up as new. And I mean completely new. Turned on iTunes Match rather than sync with the desktop, allowed photos to come down from iPhoto Stream rather than sync, downloaded apps and rearranged them manually rather than sync. And I didn’t reinstall any of the work MDM profiles; I just manually configured the required passcode protections and such.
I also tweaked a few of the settings, but not that many. I did turn off parallax view and put up a static wallpaper, and I turned off some of the location settings, but I left Frequent Locations and background updating turned on. This is, after all, iOS 7 – it shouldn’t be necessary to gut the features of the OS to get a working device. And then I let it run down to almost nothing last night before charging it overnight and setting out this morning.
Right this instant, I’m on 95% battery after 1:13 of mixed use, so maybe it worked. Fingers crossed. I’m hoping this will be enough to keep the thing viable for a while; I’m not exactly relishing the thought of having to convince management to get me a new device and a new carrier after less than a year. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deadly curious what the wife’s presumed new iPhone 5S will do on AT&T’s LTE network relative to mine on VZW.
I can tell you this, though: a standard civilian plan on AT&T (no corporate discounts) with 450 minutes talk (plus 5000 night/weekend minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile) plus unlimited texting and 3 GB data is $90 a month. The exact same plan (unlimited calling/texts, 3 GB data/month) on the exact same network (AIO Wireless is a subsidiary of AT&T) is only $65 a month. And since I only need 2 GB of data – an option AT&T doesn’t offer; it’s either 300 MB or straight to 3 GB – I could actually pay only $55 to AIO.
That’s huge. I mean, huge. There’s no contract, no 2-year commitment, and even if I paid full price for a 32 GB gold iPhone 5S, that $750 is still less than the $840 I would pay over two years on AT&T’s plan (not to mention I’m still paying AT&T $299 up front for the device). If I go with the plan I actually want, buying the phone up front and using AIO, the net result over 2 years is a savings of $630…which is just about enough to buy a new phone after two years all by itself.
So, next steps? Use this thing for a couple more days and see how it runs. If the battery starts to flake again, it’s worth seeing what happens if I use the T-Mob SIM…which means no LTE and possibly flaky coverage, but lower-powered GSM fallback instead of battery-thirsty CDMA. At least it eliminates Verizon’s specific network as part of the problem, and besides, even if if I never test that out, the SIM only cost me $1.06 shipped. Basically, the decision chain is:
IF IT DOESN’T WORK: try the T-Mobile SIM and see if moving to a GSM solution fixes or at least ameliorates the battery drain.
IF THAT DOESN’T WORK: take the phone back into Apple and see if the application crashing persists – and if it does, I don’t know what happens from there aside from “wait for an OS update and hope the wife hasn’t traded in the 4S yet”.
IF THE CRASHING IS GONE: hope against hope that they’ll take mercy on me and replace the battery, or that it will have dropped into the replacement zone on the diagnostics. If they don’t, the plan falls back to “hope the wife hasn’t traded in the 4S yet” coupled with “hope to find someone who can replace the battery on said out-of-warranty 4S for cheap.” After all, other than a slightly bigger screen and LTE, there’s not much to separate the 5 from the 4S…
And hopefully, everything will play nicely and I can go back to civilized conversations with normal people again. =)