Friday, March 25, 2011

iPhone Battery Drain--Fix!

It's happened to me twice now, but this time I was able to do something about it...

My iPhone went bonkers yesterday and stared draining the battery like there was no tomorrow. It went from fully-charged to 20% in 3 hours; that's just nuts.

I did what every iOS user does in that situation: kill all the backgrounded stuff and restart the device. Usually that works pretty well. This time it didn't.

The phone was using the battery so "hard" that the device was warm to the touch. Again, that's just nuts.

So I got the thing connected to my office WiFi and started watching the syslogger for my firewall; every TCP connection would then be logged for the device.

Sure enough, I found the culprit: the Exchange ActiveSync service for my home email (yes, I run an Exchange server at home) was getting requests from the phone every couple of seconds.

Given that I had problems with my Inbox earlier this week using Thunderbird, I assumed that I had another "broken" email message in my Inbox, and moved all the messages to another folder. The inbox cleared up on my iPhone, but it was still going after the server like gangbusters.

So I deleted the EAS profile from the phone. Blissful silence from the syslogger was the result. Then I re-applied the EAS configuration profile to the phone to re-establish the EAS connection, and voila!, the phone isn't going apeshit anymore.

I'm not sure I want to tempt fate and put all the messages from my inbox back, but I am pretty happy with the result: the battery should once again last all day.

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