Today I was experimenting with the internet connection options, suffering from weak wireless signal (Orange Livebox ) and making the most of it.

By far the most effective option I tried was disabling "Power saving" under the Maemo advanced connection options. This reduced lag by a half and greatly improved network speeds even with a similar signal quality... great so far. However after I while I started to notice the phone becoming warmer than usual specifically around the USB nub where the phone charger enters the phone. I disconnected from the charger, still a lot of heat and the scent of heat on expensive electronics too.

The only way to get the phone to cool down was either disconnect from WiFi or to enable the said "Power saving" however I wonder why this is so? I am aware that the 802.11 antennae array is based around the same area of the phone as the USB nub, but a quick search of the forums doesn't indicate anybody with similar issues so far.

A health check and sysdiag confirm that no damage was caused to the phone, but it is disconcerting to have it heat up to about fourty degrees Celcius!

The phone uses more power when you disable the power saving mode, so that's probably why it gets warm. If you charge the N900 and do something CPU-intensive it will get warm.

Well that was my initial thought. The most worrying thing about it was the fact that I use Titan's Enhanced Kernel, but thankfully there are no concerning dmesg associated with this event.

However the kernel does utilise a lot more processing power as it is based on the (as of so far unreleased) PR1.2 SDK release.

What I was also thinking was that development PR1.2 kernel plus increased WiFi power on top of the additional processing like Wifi meshing, IPv6 support, QoS functionality which comes with the package, could it just be a bit too much for the N900 hardware to handle safely yet? I am certain that this issue didn't happen on the Nokia brand kernel.

I think that if you use Bittorrent and MicroB over 3G at the same time, and charge the N900 as well, it will probably get hot even with the stock kernel. Just a guess though. I remember that I tried to download a torrent on my old Nokia E71 and browse via Wifi at the same time, it got very hot(and that CPU runs @~320MHz).

Yet overclocked at 1100MHz even at full capcity for hours... I burned in for twelve hours using a worker script to cap CPU usage at 100% to verify the Enhanced Kernel was stable... no such rise in temperature is noted. This would bring me more to suspect the WiFi array itself, which would make sense when considering that the heat seemed to be emanating from the USB nub area.

I will get some power tests done on the CPU stock vs Enhanced with the power save mode in the near future.

That would actually make some sense. When you turn off the power saving mode, the N900 probably outputs a fixed voltage and current, instead of adapting it. I'm not really a hardware wiz, so I might be wrong.

Turns out that upon restarting today I am in a reboot loop. Looks like I will have to do some investigating but so far I suspect that the PR 1.2 Enhanced Kernel is to blame when used in conjunction with the WiFi power saving.

is there any method through which we can have an enhanced battery life over wifi use ? N900 hardly spends 3 hours over wifi and soon its battery level approaches to zero.
is this only me or N900 is still asking for some thing on this issue ?
i have pr1.3 and CSSU (maemo15) installed .at 600mghz..no overlocking.
any help or suggestion will be deeply appreciated .

If you've modified thw wifi power setting, then put it back. Otherwise, the issue is probably that your access point has poor support for wifi powersaving. My N900 would last a few days idling on wifi...