iPhone 4S battery problems

So here's the latest.

Picked up the replacement phone on Monday, and restored it with the most recent backup from iTunes that evening. The phone arrived with about a 60% charge.

After one hour of minimal usage (checking settings, updating email passwords), it had dropped 20%.

I figured, maybe it needs to fully discharge and recharge. So I said to the wife to use it until it dies completely, and then charge it overnight. We did this, and charged it up (on mains power) overnight.

Day two - the wife was experimenting with the phone, seeing if it would hold its charge. Surprise surprise - it doesn't. The standby and usage times are identical (again), and it is losing about 13% an hour in standby mode. However, it's now also developed some new quirks. The vibrate motor sounds like it is shot. Whenever it vibrates, there's a muffled rattle near the speaker. Weird as this sounds, it's also got a different vibrate tone to my iPhone 4 (never really compared the tone of the vibration before...). To make matters worse, if you shake the phone gently, you can hear something rattle inside, like something's loose. I checked to make sure it wasn't a loose button, and the rattle is definitely there.

If there had been no rattle or funny noises coming from the vibrate, I might have tried the old tricks about the battery drain. But it's clearly faulty hardware, irrespective of the battery drain issue, so it went back to Telecom today. We managed to confirm that the original phone was tested and the fault was confirmed, so it was a replaced phone rather than a repaired phone (no word whether it was refurbished or not). With the second phone, they've "escalated" the fault, so hopefully it will get a faster response.

All of this makes me a little uneasy. Putting aside the hardware faults, it makes me wonder whether we were just extremely unlucky to get two different iPhones that had the same battery drain problem, or whether the problem is buried somewhere within the backup we restored from iTunes. When I was diagnosing the problem with the first iPhone, I thought I had eliminated apps, by demonstrating the battery drain even with no apps in memory. It makes me wonder whether there's some obscure bug hidden within the data of the email accounts, the txt messages, or the photos (however ridiculous that sounds). But if that is the case, then troubleshooting the problem is going to be nigh on impossible, and the only real way forward is to not restore it from a backup, and just start again from square one, with a blank phone. Not ideal.

Also - can anyone who has had a replaced iPhone confirm whether it is common or accepted practice for Telecom to package the replacement phone in bubble wrap, rather than in proper box packaging? Seems just a little haphazard to me...

mattwnz

Lizard1977

Sheagae