Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I've seen this too. What I understand it relates on how the battery behaves under heavy load and how it recovers after idling some time. So maybe it's not a bug but rather a feature and maybe it can not be avoided with the way battery capacity is measured right now.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Been seeing this in daily use. Haze/pidgin/Butterfly have terrible battery life, using jabber with transports effectively doubles battery life in my experience anyway...

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I've noticed that too. The last time I tried experimenting, Google Talk wasn't too bad. I think it ate around 3% of my battery in ~8 hours when I left it off the charger one night.

Is there a quick how-to on setting jabber up with AIM/MSN?

-jkq

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

It's pretty easy, had to test a few different servers/transports to see which was the most reliable for me (my 2g gprs is a bit unreliable) I noticed some odd behaviour on certain servers such as the N900 showing me as online even though others do not see my logged in and I would not be able to send IMs. I guess the server would timeout but the N900 would not get updated...

http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/ge...msn-yahoo.html
Follow these instructions here once you create an account you need to select service discovery in PSI and it will list all the transports (msn, aim, yahoo) etc. just enter your password and login info for the service and it will populate your contact list. After that you just need to login with ur jabber ID on ur N900. One thing to note, it seems for msn anyway that some servers will pull every single contact you ever had and ask u to authorize each. It is a bit annoying, oddly enough after testing a few servers I found some that populate your list nicely just as you have it on ur desktop with groups and all...

A listing of all the servers is located here....
http://www.jabberes.org/servers/

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Can you switch manually to 2G and repeat test with skype + gtalk ON?

To switch manually to 2G only you can disconnect from 3G, go to Settings/Phone and select "Network Mode" as 2G only. (You should disconnect from cell network first or N900 doesn't allow you to switch). There is an alternative variant - application "3G2G switcher" but the native one is a more pure experiment.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

If you run hal-device bme where is how much ma the battery is using? I don't see it.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Really depends on how much you use it. Games and emulators EAT battery life. But norrmal use, with IM accounts off. Facebook, foreca widgets on + shortcuts etc. 3g/wifi always on (search interval 30 mins) email search interval 4 hours. It usually lasts about 30 hours with a few phonecalls, about 50/60 sms'es, and a little bit of surfing.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Nowhere. I log the mAh number (battery.reporting.current) and after night (say 8 hours) I calculated the difference (let's say 1200mAh-800mAh=400 mAh). Then I divide the difference by the time e.g. 400mAh/8h -> 50mA. That's average current for the past 8 hours. And since I did nothing else (except slept :D), it tells pretty well the idling current for the given scenario.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I have been having a similar situation--battery draining quickly over the course of the day. This morning I removed Firefox and Conversations widget (uninstalled both and rebooted) following some messages here. It didn't make any difference.

I wrote a script to record the battery percentage from lshal every 15 minutes. Two interesting things:

• The percentage shown did not seem to always gel with the battery indicator in the upper status bar. For example it went all the way down to 0 and stayed there while the battery indicator moved into the green again during charging
• The percentage seemed to (usually, but not always) drop steadily--about 1-2 percent every 15 minutes.

The second point was really what I was looking for, by the way...I thought that I was seeing a fast drain at particular times, but my logging script didn't bear this out. But the first point was actually more interesting.

In any case, I determined that removing Coversations and Firefox did not resolve the problem.

Now, following some more recent posts, I have disabled google talk and skype. I have also removed (but not uninstalled) the facebook and RSS widgets. (The RSS widget seems to update itself regularly even though I have set it not to do so.) If I get more than about 8 hours tomorrow, I'll see if I can winnow down any specific culprits.

Thanks to all the other posters for (hopefully) pointing me in the right direction.

P.S. Just imagine...I could be on an iphone and not have these problems--because I couldn't run widgets, have no access to the batteries, can only install apps as allowed, and would have no ability to run scripts to record any info. But I would have fart apps!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Hey, I've done this and logged into the transport but my contact lists are not loading up at all. I logged into the jabber id on n900 as well and no contact list there either...how do i manually tell it to populate my contact lists?
thanks

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

you are right. the iphone battery life is a farce..my wife has an iphone and the only way u can use IMs like skype is by turning them on when you need it and shutting it down after that. you can't have it running in the background(at least as far as I know)......ANY phone could do that!!!!....
the n900 actually runs all these applications continously in the background...

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

i have been experiencing disappointing battery life recently, lasts about 24 hrs on average since last fw update. definitely worse than before the update.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

For me personally I don't want to degrade performance of my N900 by tweaking a few things here and switching a few apps off when not in use.

The whole point of this phone is that it can do some cool stuff and that it's like a computer in your pocket. It's no fun having to be so very conservative with use so that the battery gets through the day.

I bought this phone to use it and whilst I am 'not over the moon' with the battery performance I don't want to carry it around with almost everything switched off. I want to be able to browse the web whenever I want and to play some games when I'm stuck in a queue and listen to music or watch a film or read a book without having to worry.

THE SOLUTION TO POOR BATTERY PERFORMANCE:

Well for me it was to buy 3 spare batteries and a desktop charger. The batteries costs me about a fiver and seem to be great value and it means now that when I go long haul in a few weeks, that I'll be able to read, listen to music and watch films on my N900 without worrying about the battery.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Hi!

Does anyone knows what is this procsess where its relates omap2_mcspi?

Its eats my battery very fast, i could get rid of it only by booting n900.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Stupid question, where is the option to use only 2G or Edge networks?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Yes, I also bought a desktop charger and two spare batteries, with good results. I avoid eBay and just Googled bl-5j to find the batteries. The batteries I got look identical to the Nokia battery except in price.

I found that the batteries get much easier to install after the plastic door wears a bit.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

settings--->phone--->network

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

For me pulseaudio has been suspicious lately. Something was gnawing my battery but could not determine what because top showed no spesific load anywhere. Since pulseaudio was mentioned here earlier I noticed that it was there with a load of 2-3%. I run powertop and noticed that the processor spent most of the time at state C2. After killing the pulseaudio process the most common state were C3 and C4 (as supposed I think).

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Noticed some odd behavior yesterday. Battery was being drained really quickly all day. By the time I left work around 6pm, lshal reported the battery at 12%.

I left my cable at home, so couldn't charge it.

Went to see some family (media with FM transmitter on the 40 min drive) and was showing off the phone with the usual bounce, video, FM transmitter, browser, camera, video camera, etc.

Checked battery again (now 7pm ish) and I'm at 7%. Hmm.... That was only a 5% drop with quite a bit of heavy demo usage.

Left the thing in my pocket, and it started beeping at me around 9pm. Didn't check % though.

Got home around 11pm and was at 6% with FM transmitter on the way home. At this point I was already getting suspicious so I was actively trying to drain it. Did some wifi browsing on the couch, but it wouldn't die. So I left it unplugged and it died during the night some time. Charged it for an hour before work in the morning.

It's been on 3G all day, did some software updates and checked some email and I'm still at 77% at 6:30pm.

I'm thinking that in my case, the circuitry in the battery needed to find it's actual low point. If it were really at 12% yesterday after work, it should have died on the trip to my family. And it certainly should have died through the demo. Or using FM transmitter going home.

Hopefully, my good battery life will last more than just today.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Download the 2G/3G selection applet, streamlines the process, saves you having to dive into settings every time you want to use 3G.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I had a Palm 680 TREO and this was a constant problem with it. We had to do a calibration procedure where you plugged in the charger, waited 1 minute, pulled the battery, waited 1 min, pulled the SIM, waited 1 in. Then put the SIM in and the Battery and let charge for 6 hours. This fixed it. The battery life would triple, at least for a while.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

So a little update here:

I disabled google talk and skype and then rebooted. The battery drain seemed a little slower than before, but then I got an upgrade notice and realized that I had not uninstalled the Mozilla Runtime from the app manager. I uninstalled it, rebooted, and the battery drain seems to have slowed. I charged overnight, and unplugged the fully charged phone (green light was lit) at about 8:30am. I plugged in while in the car--but for less than 15 minutes total. I only did that because I had already hit the mid-afernoon time when it was previously bottoming out. I didn't get the low battery ding until around midnight--at least a 50% improvement in battery duration.

I am not sure why the mozilla runtime would be responsible for draining the battery. I had not even run firefox in the last few times I rebooted. Clearly it runs some background apps, though I never saw anything jump out at me in the ps output before or after removing this.

I should say that I did not take any other action to increase battery life today. I web surfed, talked, sms'ed, instant messaged, and had an email connection to my exchange server running constantly. I used the phone normally, and in the same manner I used my previous phone (AT&T Tilt).

The battery life I saw today was reasonable for a full day of phone use, and close to what I saw with the Tilt (I could go a good day and a half without recharge on the Tilt, though using an RSS reader cut that dramatically and I didn't have IM client running all day). I am actually hopeful that I will be able to use the phone without having to worry about mid-day recharging or planning around battery life.

Next steps in experimentation:

• run a few more days with current configuration to see if results are consistent
• reinstate skype and google talk to see if battery life changes
• reinstate conversations widget, rss widget, and eventually, firefox to determine if those are actually the culprits.

One more note: there was apparently a service outage here in austin today, though it seems to have been cleared up before I unplugged from the charger.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Your solution says, you got 3 spare batteries at a cost about a fiver...?? Sorry, but may I know the cost in numbers? Like $20 or so...

Thanks,
~nV!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Yes sorry! A fiver is slang for £5 in UK terms. You can pick up one battery for that if you have a look around. By the way, I have 5 batteries now.

I don't fret about using my N900 to the max now.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I never thought "3G", by itself, drained the battery...since switching to the 900, my Motorola Q on AT&T 3G, with a Seidio extended battery, lasts 6-8 days between charges as it forwards calls to my 900.

After having the 900 for going on 2 months now, for whatever reason, last week, I'm getting 12-14hrs before I drop (2) battery levels (~25%?). This on:

- T-Mo 3G (which seems to be lasting longer than on AT&T 2G)
- WiFi "enabled" all day (work from home) and (3) POP3 accounts polling in 1 hour intervals
- OM Weather polling every hour

I also noticed higher drain when logged in to SIP/Skype clients. I still don't believe it will get more than 6hrs of constant "use", but its good to know that I don't have to charge it if I leave the house in the middle of the day.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Me, too. What now worries me is that the battery door will wear out to the extent that it will start falling off the N900. I wonder if that will happen and if so how long it will take?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Just be careful with it and treat it like a delicate piece of equipment when taking it off and it should outlast your mobile contract.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but I'm going on a roadtrip and want to stream music through my phone, but as I drive I'll also have GPS / Google Maps going. I noticed today driving (1.5 hrs) that even though I had my phone plugged in to the official Nokia car adapter my battery still drained. On a 5+ hour road trip, will my phone be depleted at the end? Will the car charger give enough juice to keep the phone going with all that stuff on? BTW, I use TuneWiki, which is great... cuz I get to stream Shoutcast. I also have a BT headset, but its rather inconsistent as to whether or not it will connect so I think I'll opt for the wired headset if I get a call.

I'm also logged into Skype, but that is not required for the road trip so presumably I can turn that off...

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

You sure it was charging?

How many ma. does the charger supply?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

http://www.nokiausa.com/find-product...accessory-dc-6

I know it was charging because it said so plus the screen was on all the time. I have the screen set to be on when charging. In the car I don't want to dork with turning the screen on and off while driving.

Standard DC-6. Don't know if this is correct but:

* Input: DC 12/24V
* Output: 5.0V/550mA

I found this after doing some quick searches. Significantly lower than the 1200 mA of the wall charger if true.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My phone usage : ~2h listening music (all around 192kbps VBR 75% volume) with web browsing (edge, 3G) with enabled ICQ account.
~10min calls , 5 to 10 sms, then around 6hours on wifi , checking e-mails , downloading images ,working in terminal ower ssh (replacement for netbook :) ) .., unplugged from charger at 8 mourning , went back to home at 22 o'clock with 6% of battery

I thik this is not bad - but for sure I purchase Energizer XP4000 .
It fit exactly in my back pocket and with modified cable from telephone (twisted soft cable from phone to earphone) i can use phone without limitation (little worse handling, yes)
Price is same as two original BL-5J batteryes.
It's abble to make two full charges from empty battery (I think charging non empty battery at time of hard usage will extend this because of charging effectivity)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

How the hell do you get such usage!? I am bummed. All that I do is take my phone off charger, make few calls/sms and I need to recharge by evening!

Any tricks/tips buddy?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Same problem here.

Without being connected to wifi/3g and having no apps/widgets installed that use Internet connections I can't last a day.
I send/receive a max of 10 sms's a day and/or 1-3 short phone calls

I have 2 original batteries and I have this problem with both batteries.

Any tip is indeed very welcome

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My phone cant break a day without charging too , bud this fifteen hours are enought for me (with xp4000 no problem at all :) )

I don't know how to help :)
Only switch of wireless lan scanning , firmware updated right after unpack to PR1.1 .. you might download powertop from this site and check if CPU is underclocked automaticly or if some aplication not wakeing up too much,
with all switched of (only cell phone on) cpu run at 250Mhz and in C4 state

with three pages (no flashplayer video) playng mp3s , wifi, icq on
15% at 500Mhz 85% at 250MHz 60% C3 40% C4 state
applets with using net - RSS (~10 channels) default weather

most time spend on edge connection,brithnes at 3bars ,at night at one
mail updates are for 30 minutes only if wifi connection , rss feeds updates manual ,weather update 6hours

duno what else ...

Only first time i loaded it with mp3's , movies and images there was some time unusable becasuse of indexing (around 4000mp3 ) , which take half of battery ...

Who's been eating my battery?
 

Ok.

I've now been using the N900 for two months without any problems with the battery. Did some testing this past week to see how long I could keep the thing going when connected over wifi (2 days) and also when skype was running in the background (1 day).

Today after unplugging the device I noticed it was eating the battery too fast. Checked top, and saw pulseaudio using 2% of the cpu all the time (i had played a few videos and aac files before going to bed and plugging the charger in).

Well, a reboot fixed the pulseaudio problem (if i tried to kill the process, it would just start up again and eat more cpu). But now I have an even bigger problem. It seems there are a few other processes that just won't calm down, and keep waking the cpu up. At the moment the top of my top printout looks like this (all the time):

(ignore Xorg, top and osso-xterm, since those should be using the cpu)

Also powertop says that the total amount of wakeups is around 5000.

Could someone who doesn't have any problems with their battery check these: What is the "average" amount of wakeups with powertop when you leave the display on (no network connection, no programs in the background etc.) and also observe your top for maybe 10-20 seconds and tell are there any processes that are constantly taking up cpu time. I know I'm being a little paranoid about the background processes, but if my battery goes down from 48-72 hours to 12 hours, something is keeping the device up all the time.

Thank you for any hints or help.

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Total wakeups 1760, 58.7s | IRQ 1231, 41.0/s | Timers 529, 17.6/s
HW wakeups 2, 0.1/s | Real gp_timers expired 189, 6.3/s

... But I have 3G connected.


Compare with your output - you have "/usr/sbin/ohmd" running which means - a couple of programs start (ohmd is a "policy daemon" which checks application access to HW resources).
And bme_RX-51 is a Battery Management process - I think it is a consequence of battery drain.

More interesting is a combination of "mce", "camera-ui" and "gnome-vfs-daemon". gnome-vfs-daemon controls volume mount/unmount, including mSD card. MCE is a daemon which controls different buttons etc ... including magnetic switch on back cover. So - do you use mSD? Do you had chance to put in in some magnetic field? Do you expose a front side to flickering light?

Actually all that stuff may be because battery provides unstable power, for exam - due to high power consumer.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Additionally, I need to admit what I may also have been exposed to high battery drain. But so far I blamed it on not properly switching video circuitry (SGX) off. Or even HAM (Hildon Application Manager) which has a habit running once at the same time of day and battery going down that time. I have plan to change that time to midnight then my phone is on charger and see.

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Wow. That is a huge difference.

I kept staring at the top results a little longer. Seems that at the moment I cut&pasted the previous list, there were a few processes that aren't usually active, camera and vfs-daemon being a few of these. The ones that are constantly active are mce, ohmd and hildon-desktop. The others pop up every now and then (10 sec interval or so). Also /sbin/init keeps jumping to the top list quite frequently, is this normal? Camera-ui appears to be activated for a second when you slide open the keyboard.

But no, no mSD, no flickering lights. I'm not quite sure what you mean about the magnetic field, though.

But basically all I did was reboot the device before this started. It had been on for 9 days, during which I don't recall installing anything special except for Shortcutd (which I had already uninstalled). I guess there is always the option of reflashing, but that doesn't really solve the mystery :)

Here is a link to my powertop readings when the device is unlocked.

edit: It seems powertop is a little inconsistent. Just noticed that there are over 200 hw wakeups in the above list. Did another test earlier, which only had 5 HW wakeups (about the same amount of total wakeups, though).

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

hildon-desktop - because you use X-Term and output to it. Also, some another screen stuff.
mce - it controls any user activity. For exam - you tap in screen to keep device unlocked, that means mce work. You move device - accelerometer works --> mce works.

Both are OK, you can read about it in
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...ystem_Software

BTW, I suggest you to make a measurement in this way - start powertop, immediately bring desktop theme (put X-Term into background), close KBD and lock device via slide button and put on table - all in 10secs. After 1min unlock and see. You should have little better values, at least mce/hildon-desktop may gone away.

ohmd is another beast. It is a daemon which control access of applications to hardware resource. It has some Nokia-written policy in files. For exam, it may allow or disallow access to audio for some application and people had in past some troubles with non-system media player. It is closed source. But in my mind it runs only if somebody tries to get access to some resource intensively. Usually it happens during application start.

No. That points to intensive daemon processes terminations. If you can repeat it, it has sense to install sysklogd package and look into /var/log/syslog after you repeat it (and run 'dmesg' too). In past (PR1.0) I saw the terminations of some video processing software like tracker component gst-video-thumbnailerd because existence of some unplayable video files. In PR1.1 it just locks system media player from playing video.

N900 back cover has a small magnet and N900 body has a magnet switch. If you don't close a back cover, your mSD would not be mounted. That stuff is read by mce and transfered to execute mSD mount even you have no mSD. Just guess - intensive magnetic field or mechanical jitter (magnetic switch is mechanical, I guess) would cause a flood of signals to mce.

Hm-m, it points to tracker again! It starts looking files in file space after reboot (some timeout does exists, of course).

I see many "sleep" processes. It points to some shell work - some shell scripts are executed many times. It again supports a theory that you experiences the many process starts.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Don't know if this applies to anyone. If so, please report it here or in the bug report.

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8848

If I reboot my device before leaving home I can last all day long with lots of activity. I can connect to WiFi at work and it causes no problem. But, for some reason, connecting and disconnecting from my home's WiFi eats up my battery. :confused: