Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I enabled SmartFlex on my n900 running PR1.0 last night.

About a few hours later (4-5 or so not sure exact times) the phone rebooted while I was reading a book in FBReader.

I have not (knowingly) experienced any 32wd_to reboots (or others) on this device.

Enabled it again at the time of this post and will report if I get another reboot.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Hmm u sure you didn't have anything else going in the background like wifi etc?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

ok ... i think i am the first who will post a log of my n900 battery life

you can clearly see where it was beeing charged and when i was on it playing or doing other stuff. Study it :confused:.

I have attached the actual log from my phone it's called "viata_baterie.txt" Viata baterie in Romanian means battery life (translated here in the post) -> Open it with word not notepad cause u will understand nothing from it

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Hey that first cycle from the 30th - 31st, what was your phone usage like? Just on standby? Even with light - moderate usage my n900 battery goes down faster than that with 1 widget running, I guess it's cuz I leave edge on with the weather app updating every 4 hours?

Is there a way to set the n900 to connect to internet automatically, allow applications to update and then disconnect? I noticed that it will stay connected all the time....

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I had a reboot after this test, but I was doing intensive flash stuff so not sure it was related. Haven't tried again recently.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

well... on the 30'th i wanted too see how fast the battery is draining on the standby. No internet connection. Widgets on that day ... mmm... foreca weather (settings to update: manually) calendar, world clock with 1 additional clock (yes that takes some of the battery life as well) 6 contacts, 2 displays and some icons (email, phone book, messages, notes, browser)

You can see where i started my 3g internet connection:

I don't think there is one yet, but i'd like to see that too... though that eats battery life as well:(

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My battery life seems to be OK, except when wifi hasn't disconnected properly. This is bug 3992. Am I the only one affected by this bug on the N900?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

well.well - my (with my usage) battery life went down after PR1.1...

On Skype for 01:01:45 today
 

So i was on skype today talking for 01:01:45. Battery was fully charged before i started talking once i was done and looked at the n900 i noticed the battery was almost completely to the red bar. The N900 was also hot. Something tells me that these battery by Nokia might not be all that good. I remember with Sony Xperia X1 when it first came out that the battery use to drain really quick like the n900. Replaced it with the mugen one and that seem to solve the battery issues with xperia. I really hope that mugen comes to our rescue next month. This is really unacceptable on Nokia's end.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Nope, I have the same problem. Doesnt have to be adhoc. It happens with a normal router too to me.

I also submitted this: Bug 8232

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Please complete your bug report. I´m quite sure that they will not even look at it if you do not answer to all questions.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

What else do I have to complete? Oo

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

This is quite obvious but:
SOFTWARE VERSION:
EXPECTED OUTCOME:
ACTUAL OUTCOME:
REPRODUCIBILITY:
(always, less than 1/10, 5/10, 9/10)
EXTRA SOFTWARE INSTALLED:
If you have but I would be quite surprised if you have not installed any programs.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Guys, i'm new in this forum and i wanna share my experience with my n900 (i got it 1 week ago). Like all of you, i had problems with the poor battery life in the n900, tried many settings to improve the battery life 'cause only worked for me around 8-10 hours. Yesterday i turn it off the GPS and with no widgets like facebook or forecast, put brightness lvl 2, disable light notification (only for missed calls and sms) and now my battery is around 80-90% in 18 hours!!!!!!!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Very similar here. I park my screen on the Dashboard screen that has the open applications. Usually on a Xterm screen. It is amazing how much battery use comes from the desktops.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I expect this has been mentioned already (this is a long old thread) but I've been testing a scenario yesterday and today which looks to have identified at least one cause of rapid battery drain.

Basic situation:
My N900 has the latest firmware
3G is on
wifi is on but not associated with a network
bluetooth is off
facebook and rss feed widgets are on the desktops (2 in use)
location is on
2 IM accounts active
3 email accounts active

Yesterday:
N900 off and charging overnight. Battery fully charged when switched on at 08:00. Throughout the day it mostly sat on my desk at work, with light usage of 30 mins music playback on the bus, 2 or 3 phone calls, a couple of texts, reading and deleting a few emails and picking up a skype chat conversation (I wasn't chatting on the phone, it was picking up the conversation I was having on my laptop).

By 18:30 the battery was red and I got the low power beep. Not that great really...

Today:
Same starting situation and time _except_ I disabled the 2 IM accounts. Similar usage compared to yesterday (actually a few more phone calls), minus the IM chats of course.

By 17:30 today - approx 90% battery still remaining :) I'll keep the phone switched on and measure the eventual life of this charge with just the disabled IM accounts being the difference.

Cheers,
Alex

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

alexb, what IM accounts are you using? I was using plugins such as haze for msn and that would drain my battery fast. This week I started using jabber with msn transport and battery life has increased significantly.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Updating, 22 hours with my last configuration and battery 70-80% !!!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

FYI
It takes couple of (maybe 4-6 recharges) to make battery calibrated. First runs for me were 4-5 hours and now I´m getting 10 hours and above depending how much i use wifi(i use it quite much).

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

How are you determining the battery level?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Some measurementes. I have BT always on and hidden although during these tests, it wasn't connected. Latest FW. Only widget using internet automatically is OMWeather, which updates itself when connected every 4 hours. I log the current mAh capacity reported by 'hal-device bme' every 10 mins. When the device is in standby, the value does not change but it does not matter, since as soon as I unlock it, it is updated. I've measured these standby currents during the night (6-8h) when I did not move the phone or do anything with it.

WiFi connected: 15 mA -> ~80 h
3G connected: 20 mA -> ~60 h
3G + skype connected: 80 mA -> ~16 h
3G + MSN (Haze) connected: 120 mA -> ~10 h

Hours rounded downwards. A shorter test with 3g+skype+msn was also around 120 mA but it was shorter time so I'm not so sure about that yet. I do recharge my phone every night so skype+3g is still ok, but MSN can't cope 1 day. I migth try another plugins or using msn through jabber.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

This is great info to know. Thanks very much!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Team,
I did a full working day (9am-4pm) tcpdump on my 3g interface and here is what I found.
28% of packets were to googletalk
some sip packets (which i have registered)
14% to some london IP which I couldn't resolve..it is 79.69.135.209 (could someone help here pls)
rest were to random IPs, some as little as 2 packets, but around 3000 packets I think...
basically, there were packets trasnmistted almost every 3-5 seconds (or round that mark).
I further looked up the ports which these random packets were connecting from (source ports) and found them to be associated to skyhost...a skype process.
so the majority of my packets were skype & googletalk which were constanly chatting...maybe keepalive or presence messages.
tomorrow I will take these applications offline and keep my 3g connected and check how long the battery lasts.
if these programs are turned on & phone is on 3g, battery lasts at mots 8 hours with just a phone call or two lasting 10-15 minutes..

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

skype and googletalk using the built-in integration.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I am sure all of us are dying to find out....please LIST all your configuration

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I initially was going by the battery indicator display, but having done a search, running lshal|grep percentage says currently 53% charge remaining. I assume it's more accurate than the battery display indicator, as that looks more like 66% at the moment.

Cheers,
Alex

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Updating, 42 hours since last full charge, yesterday i saw 20 min of video on speakers, listened music around 30 min, web surfing 30min, phone calls, (15min), 15 sms, upload video in facebook in 10 min and shared files by bluetooth (15mb) and my battery shows little less than 50% !!!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I wonder what sort of battery life you would get if you left it connected to 3g or 2g internet all the time :p

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

is 3/2g on all the time?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My operator doesnt support 3G in my country, only use GSM

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Yes but do u leave ur 2G gprs connected all the time?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

What about email, do you have it checking at a regular interval? Or are you in a "disconnected" state most of the day?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I could get similar results IF I do not leave internet connected, 2G or Wifi...but when I stay connected battery seems to drain faster than ur results. Lucky u :)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Yes, is connected all the time :)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Which program do you have connected all the time? is it only the IM accounts? (only built in gtalk, skype)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

hello again,
so I think I resolved my n900 battery problem. Here is the summary
1) I noticed battery would run out very quickly (<8hrs) when I had 3g turned on.
2) I tried disconnecting from Internet and use it just as a phone. Battery life was superb..2-3 days and battery was still above 50%
3) Obviously, n900 is not supposed to be used just as a phone, so I installed tcpdump(packet capture utility) on my phone. Yesterday i turned on 3g again and my running programs were skype, googletalk, SIP phone , gmail, exchange mail, omweather. I don't think i have anything else. The battery ran out as usual in 8 hrs.
I examined all packets transferred yesterday with the help of tcpdump (exported to wireshark on my pc) and found out that skype & gtalk were very chatty programs. They were constantly sending out packets which meant that 3g was in constant use. Until today I had assumed that simly keeping the Internet connection turned on via 3g was the reason for battery running out.
4) Today I have 3g connected full time but I shutdown skype & gtalk, its been nearly 8 hrs and battery level is 75%. note: the battery indicator is still nearly at 90% but we now know thats not true...

conclusion:::
BATTERY DOESNOT RUN OUT BECAUSE 3G OR 2G IS TURNED ON, BUT BECAUSE PROGRAMS LIKE SKYPE AND GTALK USE IT CONTINOUSLY TO SEND OUT KEEPALIVE MESSAGES...NOTE: I DIDNT USE SKYPE OR GTALK YESTERDAY, THE PACKETS I SAW WERE JUST CONSTANT KEEPALIVE MESSAGE...CONTINOUSLY EATING MY BATTERY JUST TO TELL GTALK AND SKYPE THAT IM ONLINE
5) next steps. now I need to find out how to shut up skype & gtalk while still remaining online. the skype protocol has been configured so, I believe, to get around firewalls, which is basically why many service providers find it hard to block skype.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Would be interesting to see if it's Nokia's implementation of skype+gtalk clients that is the issue. I.e Fring on s60 is known to be VERY battery conservative, unfortunately Fring on n900 may not be stable enough to test how well it manages battery

Also, I wonder if there is any configuration to reduce the number of data packets used for IM. If you halve the packets, maybe you wait 3 seconds v.s 1.5 secs for an IM response.. no big deal. Especially to reduce when no active conversations in place...

filed bug: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8581
Hope Nokia consider this change

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

To add a bit to the confusion, I found out that the percentage reported by lshal sometimes goes up again! I'm using the desktop command execution widget to see my battery percentage and at a cetrain moment it was 18%. Then I refreshed half an hour later or so and it was at 25%! Again 2 hours later of almost no usage at all, it went down to 20%.
So maybe the kernel battery measurement is a bit off?
On the other hand, my battery life is great. I get 4 days out of it, while being wireless online from time to time (30 minutes by day tops), only 2G and wireless switched off when not used.

Franky

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

3G + MSN/ICQ over Jabber: 30 mA -> ~ 40h.

That's more like it, by using jabber to connect to MSN & ICQ I get 4 times the battery lifetime compared to MSN-Haze plugin :) Very nice.

That's right, my data supports this too. I have yet to analyze jabber but a friend did analyze some desktop version which only sent 1 packet per minute.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

is there a way to fix this rather than us waiting for Nokia to fix it. i would really like to have gtalk on all the time but leaving it on will shorten the battery life.