I've had my N900 for a couple of weeks now, and since it's been running since then. Battery life hasn't been great, but I can survive through the day on a charge, so I charge overnight. That hasn't been a problem for the past few weeks, until yesterday. Yesterday I put my phone on the "silent" profile due to a meeting, and when I looked a few hours later, the device was dead. In battery-eye I see a straight line all the way from 8 AM when I disconnected the charger to battery depletion at 2 PM.

I've charged the phone again, booted and all is fine again now. I've no special applications running on the background, haven't updated any of them for at least a week and didn't do anything special during the meeting I was in (the N900 sat in my pocket the entire day ). Weird, huh?

I'll try to make a battery-eye screenshot to illustrate the difference.

How much is this few hours ?

Check 'top' and look for process running at near 100% I had behavior like this when the RSS reader maxed out the CPU for no apparent reason.

My phone has started doing something similar. Can be using it all day - 3g or GMS - connected or not and get a deceint level of pwer. Line drops quite slowly. then when it hits 20% it give a vertical drop to 0. No new programs and only started this a few days ago.

Let's see...

I unplugged the phone at about 8AM as I always do and went to work. At around 9AM I changed profile to silent and remembered to change it back at around 4:30PM only to find my phone dead. So I put a bit of juice back in, booted and had a look at battery eye. It showed on the graph the battery depleted at around 2PM. So...from 8AM to 2PM the battery went from 100% to dead, which is 6 hours.

Normally, I start charging again evenings. The night before the depletion problem I started charging at about 8PM and at that point the battery was still at 40%, which means it only took about 60% of battery juice in the 12 hours it was off charger. Still a lot, but acceptable for daily use. Simple calculation says that one day the N900 takes about (60/12) 5% battery juice per hour and the next it suddenly takes (100/6) 16.7%...without changes between days. No updates, no new software, no different usage profile...after recharging and a boot it's back to normal.

Obviously I wasn't able to check the process list as the device was shut off due to lack of battery juice All I know is what I've done before and after which was...nothing.

There's a bug in pulseaudio/tonegend which will keep pulsaudio running at about 2% CPU all the time.
Use HTOP or top to see if this is what happens to you and then do a "killall tonegend" from a root shell to get rid of the problem.

I've found that high battery drain is usually caused by applications running in the background.

In particular, I've found micro-b browsers open on certain websites cause a big drain, while other websites don't. Sometimes this is caused by animations, but I have also seen examples where that didn't seem to be the case.

I am guessing that another cause is faulty/badly written javascript, that doesn't block as much/often as it should (I've also seen this using firefox on the desktop).

So beware web pages! Only keep open ones you trust!

That's a little weird PolarWolf. Yesterday, after having the phone only a few weeks without any problems, the very same thing happened to me. After I had turned the phone to silent for a short time in the morning?

No idea why? Charged it up again and it appears back to normal buy obviously something is amiss

just yesterday the browser stays at 100% cpu after closing and the battery was empty after 3 hours. happened to me for the second time. also sometimes other background processes are "running wild".

Load Applet ( http://maemo.org/downloads/product/Maemo5/load-applet/ ) helps to recognize them...

Please add your comment or vote for this bug:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9887

Happened to me also, need Nokia to acknowledge and fix.