Is your iPhone 4S / iOS5 chewing your battery?

Users of Apple's new iPhone 4S have reported that the battery life is abysmal even when no apps are open.  With battery life dropping by up to 10% an hour, with nothing open.  This has also been noticed by a few users of other models of iPhones since upgrading to iOS5.

The problem was first brought to light by The Telegraph in England and apple had been unable to explain it.

The fix for this is quite simple - the battery life is being drained by location services.  To stop this drain simply open your settings, go to location services, scroll down to the bottom where it says System Services and open this.  Then disable every service except for Cell Network Search.

Battery life can also be effected by a bug in the iCloud Contact Sync coding, which causes the processor to work hard, causing the battery to drop 20-30% in 10-15 minutes while running warm.  This can possibly be fixed by by disabling contacts in the iCloud or restarting the device.

But whatever happens expect the engineers at apple to find a solution to the issues and a fix to be issued with the next iOS update.

$$$ Ka-Ching $$$

First the major credit card companies brought out their instant pay options - Visa PayWave & Mastercard PayPass and were latched onto by major banks around the world.  Now Australian bank Commonwealth (owners of New Zealand's ASB) have launched their own version based on the iPhone platform.

Kaching is being launched exclusively on the iPhone, but will later on be available for android phones.  Until NFC (Near Field Communication) chips are installed as standard (expected in the iPhone 5) users will have to purchase a compatible iCarte case with built in NFC chip, to be able to take advantage of this app.

In addition to wireless NFC payments, the Commonwealth Bank's Kaching app is also the world's first to provide peer-to-peer payments (P2P) via mobile, e-mail and Facebook. The Kaching app links to the iPhone's address book to enable mobile and e-mail payments, while the app will link direct to your Facebook ID to enable payments via the social networking service. The Kaching app will enable mobile, e-mail and Facebook payments to non Commonwealth Bank customers by directing these users to a secure, external site to collect payments.

Read more about Kaching from ARN HERE