Apple is currently investigating reported battery life problems experienced by iPhone 4S users. There are many tips and tricks floating around about how to extent battery life on your iPhone, but you shouldn't have to shut down most of the useful functions of your device to get battery life back. Normally these problems are due to specific bugs or corrupted files in the iPhone firmware or applications (this happened with the iPhone 4.1 update).

Apple will often issue a fix in the next iOS update, however in the meantime iPhone users must do what they can to solve the problem or deal with abbreviated battery time. There are many general tips and tricks that can improve battery life on your iPhone, but these involve much compromise and will switch off many features of your iPhone. In the past specific apps such as Ping and Game Center were pegged as culprits. The flood of feedback from users of the iPhone 4S point to these top 5 fixes for short iPhone 4S battery life:

IntelliscreenX has arrived to improve iOS 5 Notification Center and add access to notifications, widgets, emails and more directly from the lock screen. Intelliborn has launched the app in a public beta phase with a free trial. When the final version is released the software package will cost $9.99.

Those upgrading to IntelliscreenX from a previous version will only pay $7.99, and if you've purchased Intelliscreen after 9/20 you get the upgrade for free. Intelliscreen is routinely cited as one of the big reasons to jailbreak your iPhone, because it puts important information at your fingertips right from the lock screen.

It may only be the first step, but iPhone developer MuscleNerd has successfully jailbroken the iPhone 4S. According to his post on Twitter, there are "huge missing pieces" with much work to be done before a public release can be contemplated. Still, we can see in the screenshots below that MuscleNerd has jailbroken an iPhone 4S running iOS 5. On the left is console root access on the device.

The right screenshot shows Cydia and Siri running on the iPhone 4S with iOS 5. For those waiting for a jailbreak solution for the iPhone 4S, this is encouraging news and it's only a matter of time until the iPhone Dev-Team or someone else gets everything together for a major iPhone 4S jailbreak release.

With well over 4 million iPhone 4S units sold over the first week of release, some owners are reporting that battery life is inexplicably short with normal usage. Even compared to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, for some reason the new design is sometimes experiencing power drain for no apparent reason. According to the Guardian, Apple engineers have begun to respond to iPhone 4S owner complaints and many have installed diagnostic software to help track down the issue.

One of the unannounced iPhone 4S surprises was a shortening of the standby time on the device to 200 hours down from the iPhone 4 spec of 300 hours. There was no wave of concern over this number, until the iPhone 4S started losing battery power at a much faster clip in some cases. Initial reports of shorter than expected battery life have evolved over time into serious battery drain problems in some cases.

For those iPhone owners who haven't made the jump to the iPhone 4S, you may be wondering how you can get access to the most hyped iOS 5 feature around: the Siri personal assistant. Siri may bring voice commands and interaction with your smartphone to a whole new level, but Apple has limited the feature to its latest hardware. Even though developers have ported Siri to run on the iPhone 4, the software will not communicate with Apple's servers unless it's on the iPhone 4S.

The original Siri app, formerly available on the App Store to both iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users is now defunct. Not only has it been pulled from the store, but if you have it installed on your iPhone the software no longer works. So what is an iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS user to do? Here are some alternatives to Siri that will get you talking to your older iPhone in no time.