“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices,” Apple said in the statement. “We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
A subset of iPhone 4S owners have been complaining about very poor battery performance, with some reporting losing 10-15% of their battery power every hour with the device in standby mode. On Tuesday, TMO rounded up all of the theories and attempted workarounds for the problems, but the long-term fix will have to come in the form of Apple’s iOS 5 update.
On Friday, we reported that Apple had been reaching out to some customers complaining about their battery performance in an effort to get data from their devices. At that time, a support thread on Apple’s support forums about this issue had more than 1,400 posts and 106,000 page views. Five days later, that thread has 3,136 posts and more than 206,000 page views.
Some might argue that acknowledging the problem and promising a fix before it’s ready is slightly out of character for Apple. If so, this could be yet another small change that Tim Cook has brought to the company since he took over. On the other hand, this could be Apple deciding that damage control was more important than the company’s trademarked Secrecy™ in this all important holiday shopping season.
Either way, the knowledge that a fix is on the way will likely be most welcome to those users experiencing the problem.