I also had poor battery in the begining. But now I am happy enough.

There's some things to note:

1- Using the phone as a computer, ie: actively browsing, playing games,sygic, recording video, taking a bunch of pictures, etc... might suck the battery in about 4-6 hours if you are lucky. Same with talking on the phone (8 hours at most in gsm?)

2- Standby, if no power hungry apps running can be a couple of days... with very little talking, etc, just standby.

3- Standby, connected to 3g... less than a day, again with no talking or anything.

4- Wifi doesn't seem to have as much impact on standby. Actively browsing? Refer to point one.

So, in conclusion, if you use it like a laptop, expect just a bit longer than regular laptop runtime, not much more. If you use it like phone, it is ok, but avoid 3g as much as you can, its the worst battery offender in this case.
Anything in the middle... use any opportunity to add some charge to it.

Also I have noticed that as much as you care and check battery status, the quicker it empties. Just forget about the phone and don't even look at it, and you'll be surprised at how long it can really run on a charge :P

10h, yes. thats the average.

But the real min-max battery can go from 2 days to 5 hours.

2 day? sms only
5 hours? make a compilation from a big c++ project, like mono-project, hard 100% cpu assured and you can use your phone as an electrical stove in a cold winter

to have something to compare, my milestone droid runs out of battery before than my n900

if i got 4 day standby like the quoted time, or even anything close, i'd be the first on here to espouse the virtues of the battery.
fact is, my battery (or my device) is almost unusable right now, looking for answers here, not criticism.

4 day stand by?

How can you be 4 day without playing almost one video on it ?

To further investigate your problem, please create the following file under XTerminal:

and then attach the following two files here:

I have nothing positive to say about any of jobber's comments, more importantly nothing negative about the N900. For me it's a vast step up from anything on offer in the Symbian world. Seriously, an expectation for some undefined number of hours (obviously 10 is not enough) from a computer with wifi active the whole time. Okay. Good one.

I don't think 'standby' quite means what you think it does. Standby is not 'Wifi running quietly in the background' - Standby means no touching, no wifi, no 3G, no nothing, just an N900 in factory state sitting there, like a door stop.

My N95 runs about a week in off line mode, around 5 days if I never touch it. N900 will go for 4 days if you don't use it, maybe a little longer if you stick it in tablet mode and continue not touching it.

dunno if this would help but, disabling gps signal in settngs helped me a bit. I found it under 'locations'

did you flash the emmc too?
i had got the same battery problem if i updated to pr1.2 without emmc flash.

IRC, Skype, gtalk, etc use alot, especially on 3g.

It's not "standby" at all to have those running..