Re: N900 battery life
 

Ok another test thats a little more controlled. I fully charged my N900 last night before I went to sleep (~4am, most likely a bit later). Got up a little while ago (we'll say 10:30am and make it an even, generous 6.5hrs).

Stuff running/settings (display was off)
- I left it with the alarms/clock app open.
- Facebook widget
- Weather widget
- WiFi
- Email checking every 15minutes

Battery was around %50 when I woke up, maybe a tad less.

That's kind of terrible, seems surprising even to me, having used the device the past week. I'm guessing it's either the facebook widget or weather widget that caused most of the drain. The apps released before the N900 was even out couldn't have been tested that well. For example, I had performance issues early on that seemed to be corrected by removing the AP News widget.

Re: N900 battery life
 

so what is the rule for phones? keep plugged in for charging as often as possible? plug in before bed for charging even if 50% full?

personally i'm a heavy user of this N900. getting a spare battery. trying to find a desktop battery charger.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Does the weather widget access the GPS at all? (I recall something similar with the n97). Also are you on Tmobile 3G or at&t GSM?

Re: N900 battery life
 

Ah sorry, I'm on AT&T at the moment. Using ForecaWeather, looking in the settings there doesn't seem to be anything about GPS or automatically reporting your location. I had to switch it manually from London to New York. Set to check weather every hour.

Re: N900 battery life
 

wow, such a heavy battery drain and you're not even on 3G! Had you installed any apps other than the one that come with the phone? Hopefully its a runaway app and not because the n900 cannot go for more than 12hrs with the most minimal use

Re: N900 battery life
 

If it is a runaway app I'm not sure what it is. Top while idle:

Mem: 229340K used, 16208K free, 0K shrd, 16312K buff, 58468K
CPU: 47.3% usr 0.0% sys 0.0% nice 52.6% idle 0.0% io 0.0
Mem: 229572K used, 15976K free, 0K shrd, 16316K buff, 58516
CPU: 1.7% usr 1.3% sys 0.0% nice 88.8% idle 7.9% io 0.
Load average: 0.67 0.83 0.57
PID PPID USER STAT RSS %MEM %CPU COMMAND
771 648 root S < 16428 6.6 0.7 /usr/bin/Xorg -log
1018 908 user S 8980 3.6 0.4 /usr/bin/hildon-st
1025 908 user S 8968 3.6 0.4 /usr/bin/hildon-de
2982 2979 user R 736 0.3 0.4 top
2952 1161 user S 37316 15.1 0.2 /usr/sbin/browserd
2977 908 user S 9836 3.9 0.2 /usr/bin/osso-xter
767 2 root SW 0 0.0 0.2 [sgx_misr]
2807 908 user S 18804 7.6 0.0 /usr/bin/modest
1608 908 user S 12156 4.9 0.0 /usr/bin/browser
1021 908 user S 10376 4.2 0.0 /usr/bin/hildon-ho
~ $

Re: N900 battery life
 

I must agree... the battery life for the N900 is terrible. My N95 ( which has 2+ years old batter) still produces more energy than the battery of the N900. Don't get me wrong, I like the phone but the battery life is terrible... Hence, I ordered for two additional batteries on ebay.

Re: N900 battery life
 

I find that astonishing. I unplugged mine this morning at about 9 am. It spent the next 8 hours connected to GPRS, running the data monitor. During that time I checked email about 6 times, mauku the same. I browsed a few webpages. In total I transfered about 3 mb of data. I checked the calendar a couple of times, sent an SMS, changed a number of settings, shot a few seconds of video and took about 6 photos. The GPRS signal is lousy - the phone has to keep connecting and disconnecting. In fact, even the basic cell phone connection drops repeatedly.

Then I returned home, so it switched to wifi. I didn't have time to do much before going out again (back to GPRS) and then came home about an hour ago. Since then I've adjusted a few more settings, checked things on the desktop and done a bit of playing around. In total it's been unplugged for nearly 13 hours, 9 of those on GPRS, 4 on wifi. The battery is showing about 2/3 full.

One question: do you have the sceen set to full brightness? People who have it set to 4/5 seem to be reporting better battery life. (Though I can't see that mattering while you're asleep!)

Re: N900 battery life
 

I am having terrible battery life as well Ill try this trick of setting it to 4/5...

Also it takes forever for the thing to charge with the usb cable right?

Re: N900 battery life
 

As opposed to every 15 minutes through the night.

Could it be the email checking app is a power hog?

If the answer is maybe :) could it be dependent on the size of inboxes and/or IMAP vs. POP? There are reports that the email app is very slow on large inboxes - implying it's a CPU hog at processing them. That shouldn't affect fetching a few new mails but you never know, if it's doing something silly to compare remote and local inboxes. Just a thought.

We could with a tool that measures the cumulative system resources spent on different apps - CPU time, network activity etc. "time" does it for one process, but not cumulatively over many instances of the same process.