Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano.

I'm not the only one who encountered poor battery performance with the new iPhone 4S. Apple's support forum is full of messages of angry and resigned users, disappointed by a product that should "simply work". My iPhone simply does not work for enough time.

I wrote a message in that forum, describing my problems. The battery of my new iDevice was losing more than 50% in 7-8 hours of stand-by time, even if most battery-draining settings were turned off (iCloud, location services, push notifications and so on).

iPhone 4S

The same day I wrote the message, Apple published 5.0.1 version of iOS. The new version should have addressed some bugs that were affecting the battery life of so many users. I installed the new version, but the battery draining remained the same.

Phone calls from Cupertino

The next day I received a call from an unusually long phone number. It was from Cupertino. An Apple engineer had read my forum post, and he wished to gather more informations about my phone. He also asked me if I agreed to install a profile on my iPhone that would have monitored my battery usage.

The following day he called me back, and, according to his instructions, I sent him my battery logs. 24 hours later I found two messages in my answering service from two distinct Apple's workers, where they invited me to recall them: they wished to go on with the investigations on my phone. I sent an email to one of them, George, who short after called me back. He made me digit some strange numerical codes on the phone, God knows what was their effect. He also invited me to reinstall the battery profile.

The day after, last Tuesday, George called me back again; he asked me to digit other secret codes and helped me to upload via ftp the backup of my entire iPhone to Apple's servers.

The solution

Since Tuesday, I have not received any new call from Apple, but in the meantime I've found a solution to my battery problems. As probably known, iPhone uses Micro-SIM cards, that are, as they say, the same of normal SIM cards, with the only difference that the latter have less plastic around the main chip. So, as many others did before, following one of the many guides available in the web I've cutted my 2007 Vodafone SIM card down to Micro-SIM size.

At the beginning, I did not suspect that the problem could be in that. Network reception was great, web surfing was very fast, and Apple's engineers did not mention the SIM card at all.

Then, the day before yesterday, my cousin Dario made me notice that my SIM could be too old. Or, I thought, my cutted SIM was not equal in every aspect to a real Micro-SIM, and that could represent the cause of some problems.

So, trying to replace my cutted SIM with a real Micro-SIM was worth the effort. And so I did yesterday, and, men, my iPhone battery problem was solved in a big way! With almost all services on (iCloud, push notifications, localization services), in 7 hours my phone lost only 8% of battery life, while before it would have lost at least 50%.

I explained my story to George sending him an email, but I've not received any answer yet. If there will be news I will udpate this blog post. In the meantime, I encourage all unlucky users whose iPhone is sucking battery too fast to test their phone with another SIM, possibly a not self-cutted Micro-SIM.

Now I can finally surf ElectroYou.it everywhere and in high definition, without worring about that little number on the top right of the screen.

ElectroYou