Over the weekend a friend came over proudly showing off sharing her brand new iPhone 4S (we would too, it's a beauty). She said the upgrade was a welcome one, except for one major issue plaguing her first major iPhone upgrade since the 3GS model: poor battery performance. She was reporting an issue with her battery draining faster than ever experienced before without any apps open or extraneous use. Her iPhone 4S was just discharging and running on empty way too fast to be attributed to anything she had done since adopting the phone. But there seems to be a very simple solution...
Until Apple releases a firmware/software update, new iPhone 4S users experiencing poor battery performance should give this one-toggle solution proposed by iDownload a try:
Go to Settings > Location Services > System Services to see if the purple location icon is displayed up in the status bar. If so, toggle off "Setting Time Zone." The arrow icon should now disappear.
According to iDownload, testing this simple settings change on 4 different iPhone 4s handsets, a 4G model, and even the 3GS resulted in improved battery life, as illustrated by Oliver Haslam's screenshot below:

Seems an easy bandage solution for now. We'd love to hear back from other iPhone 4S users experiencing the issue and report back if this toggle setting made a difference.
Comments (4)
Cool, trying it out. I'll let you know my results.
This seems to work a tiny bit, but my battery is still draining rather quickly.
I've had it off the charger for an hour and 20 minutes and my battery is already below 80%. And this is with my phone in standby for most of the time, the rest of the time was using text messaging, Spotify and Words with Friends.
I dont have an iPhone, I have a Samsung Focus windows phone and the battery lasts about 6 hours. Samsung says its a phone issue and the next model will be better. Yeah, because that helps me, thanks. Sheesh. I guess the more texting and apps you use...
I don't have an iPhone, I have a LG Optima S that burns up when I'm not using it. When I'm not using my phone (at work) I usually put it on "Airplane" mode. I don't get any calls or can make any, but when I'm ready I turn the airplane mode off and use it. I still receive messages the caller just gets an "I'm not answering..." sort of message. Additionally, I've installed "Juice Defender" for the android ( http://www.juicedefender.com/ ) which is mostly free. :) THAT in itself has been a battery saver. After I installed that, battery life almost doubled. Good stuff.