Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

He has no WiFi.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Here's some ideas....though I dont think any one will be willing to do this, here goes:

1) Use a command line that takes off the key board lights (You wont need key lights at day time) when Its night you can use a command line to turn on the key lights again.

2) Use a command line to power down the LCD lights to 80% or so...(20% battery increase)

3) Use a command line to under clock the device by 50 or 100mhz. (Dont think the n900 needs the full 600mhz anyway)...


These other methods are quite obvious but I'll state em anyway...

1) Limit your self to the amounts of apps you want to multitask (3 or so apps).

2) Make sure you close off useless applications. Widgets WILL kill your battery. Limit the amount of widgets you use, or at least use widgets that do constantly run in the background (even when wifi is off) as this will significantly decrease battery life.

3) Use 2 or 3 customizable home screens only, not the full 4 (I honestly feel the battery bug has a connection to the homescreens and their widgets)...

4) The more processes running in the background, the more battery life wasted. Battery life is wasted due to the amount of resources used by an application(s).

Well there ya have it. I'm not saying 'you have to do all of this' you can pick and choose whichever one option you prefer if your interested. Cheers...

Here's a thought also. The wifi tends to use the most resources on the phone, I'm not talking about the browser, I'm talking about the wifi itself. Most widgets are constantly connected to wifi, or if not connected, they are constantly trying to connect, whether the wifi is on or off. This may or may not bring about a points of congestion in the phone which in turn might cause short bursts of massive battery drainage. But this is just a thought....

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Just a quick update before heading to bed. I installed sysklogd, and there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Too much stuff to go through at this point, but at a quick glance at least shortcutd may be causing some problems. Even though it has been uninstalled, it keeps starting and stopping continuously. Noticed some other problems too, but must continue tomorrow.

Stopping the nonexistent shortcutd got rid of ohmd, but mce is still quite active. Wakeups are down to 4000, which is still not good.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I really like these ideas. I'm sure it's not for everyone, especially those who don't want to 'have to' adjust these things. Do we really have the ability to adjust these 'on the go'?

Could you explain, or link me to somewhere where I can learn how?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Bump, just in case we have any weekend Maemo-goers that can chime in.

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Look into files /var/lib/dpkg/info/shortcut* - it may list some shell macro files under /etc directory. You may try to move that files to /home/user and see that happens next. Especially files under /etc/event.d, /etc/init.d/ and so on.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Is there any news about the extended battery from mugen.

Is it the same size and when does it come out exactly this month ?


http://www.mugen-power-batteries.com...okia-n900.html

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

it definitely wont be the same size, i suspect they will cheap out and simply make battery that looks like 2 Nokia batteries stacked ontop of each other. Making the N900 even thicker than most netbooks.

its a shame couldnt somehow make the battery both wider and slightly thicker by replacing the internal casing (remove the space taken by the stylus)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

various rumblings from tech sites point to a slated FEB 2010 release, which may mean absolutely nothing and a month or so more waiting.

on a separate unrelated note, that's a wicked nick 900gle. shows your support for the n900 while snubbing g$$gle at the same time. i wish i was smart enough to think of that.

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Do you think shortcutd could be a potential power eater?

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Not normally. In my case the earlier version left a few startup scripts behind after uninstalling, and when I rebooted the N900, those kept trying to run.

The problem seems to now have been fixed: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=105

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My phone has been very weird with the battery. A week ago the battery life went from being very average to absolutely terrible. I would wake up 6am, have to charge the battery by 12 noon and then again by 6pm and finally an overnight charge by midnight. It simply could not last more than 6hrs. It was like that for a whole week.

Today I woke up by around 5am now it is 7pm and I have still not had to charge the device. So after having needed to charge every 6hrs at best for the last 1 week I have today gone over 14 hrs without needing a charge. Yet there has been no real difference in my usage today and I have not uninstalled any programmes that could have been eating battery life.

So what gives? Why the huge difference in battery performance?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

have you made a reboot?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

strange thing just happened, I had 3 processes eating more than 50% of my CPU all the time :
gconfd-2 (16%), dbus-deamon --system --nofork(26%) and hildon-desktop (22%).

Reboot didn't solve it, still same behaviour and of course my battery was draining by the minute...

I finally stopped this behaviour by killing the gconfd-2 process as root, it made the others return to normal.

After reboot, same processes start acting up again, now also rivalled by the trackerd in the beginning. But that dies off pretty quickly, as expected.

So, 5 min. after reboot, still stuck with 54% solid CPU utilization. I did get quite a lot of updates pushed today, has anyone seen a similar behaviour ?

What's the gconfd-2 process ? Any way to further way (logfiles etc ..) to troubleshoot what the gconfd-2 process was doing and what (if any) the offending package might be ?

thanks.

Edit : I know know -sort of- what gconfd-2 does, thanks to http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...ferences-Gconf.

After some googling around I found there is on desktop versions of gnome, a file called "saved_states" containing a log of requests handled by the gconfd. This is should be in ~/.gconfd but is missing on Maemo. Any idea someone where to find a similar file or have a similar functionality ?

I don't like windows style solutions like reflash and restore ... So I rather find the root cause ...

Edit 2 : my source ... maybe someone else can distill some more info out of it ?http://www.mail-archive.com/desktop-...msg307873.html

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

same problem here . gcnfd-2 is killing my battery now . even a reboot can not help much . 3 processes (gcnfd-2 , hildon-desktop and d-bus daemon ) is taking almost half cpu usage when idle .

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

same problem here. gconfd-2, dbus and hildon-desktop eat up to 80-100 %cpu all the time until i quit gconfd-2

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I even reflashed, then all was fine. I then restored all apps from the backup (in multiple times, as it's such a big list). Only after the last install batch (late this morning) I got the issue again. Where can I find a timestamped list of apps installed ? I'm not that great yet with all apt tools ...

Anyway, it must be a very recent App update causing this. Should we combine our applist and see what the overlap is ? To pin down the guilty one ?

Maybe related :
in the HAM, menu item log, I can find load of errors.
This happens in LOADS of places, by the looks of it refering to gconf and file paths ...
This is one example, there are thousands similar ones, with different path. Anyone an idea where to find this log on the filesystem ?

This last thing smeels like this bug :https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5448

But it really happens in loads of (gconf??) places and loads of files ... Can this be the cause for the constant high CPU load ? Anyway, I'll try to see if the temp solution mentionned in the bug report can fix this as well. Need to go now, taxi is waiting. And planes don't ....
Any idea ?

ps. Yesterday I was on PR1.1 (UK version), for the reflash I used 1.1.1 (global) and still same issue...

Cheers

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Look at the timestamps on the files in /var/lib/dpkg/info. "ls -clt | more" will list them in date order.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Had very similar issues - went from Uk to global firmware. I have removed all widgets and its alot better.

Still not as great as when I first got it.

Scott

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

my recent updated app are : motified hildon desktop , scim tables , scim symbol , headphone damon , maemo mapper .

My guess will be motified hildon desktop .

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

yep, that was also my suspect from the beginning, I tried to remove it but for some reason or another it was still active.

This afternoon I got a new update to the modified hildon desktop pushed, it looked very suspicious, 2 updates in 2 days so I accepted it, rebooted and ... problem solved !. Back to stable, not overheating system :)

At least I now have a global version of the firmware, the backup size has gone down from 26 MB to 3 MB and at it feels a lot faster. I also think the idle CPU usage is less than before. So after all, I'm kind of happy I had the problems and I was forced to reflash :D

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Just updated modified hildon desktop 1.14 and everything is back normal now .

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Question:

I have been searching around but I just got lost in the threads. What happens if I try to use a battery from another Nokia device which fits in the slots perfectly? Would it work?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

It depends on whether it is 3.7v, contains same design concept, has the same chip as bl5j, etc etc

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I mean, what about the BL-5c, from the n95 8gb?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

No it wont work as Bl-5c is a different class from Bl-5j.

In any case Bl-5c contains 850mah as opposed to the Bl-5j's 1300mah. So basically the Bl-5c would not last as long as the Bl-5j. You would probably have like 4-6hrs with that battery even if it worked.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I didn't check this thoroughly because I don't have the time, but I think Nokia Messaging drains the battery significantly.

Until a few days ago I had regular IMAP Gmail checking every 15 minutes. At home in the weekends I'd leave the phone on WiFi, not connected to IM, just the email and exchange calendar sync every 30 minutes, with very little other usage. The phone could last the whole day and then some, the battery not even dipping below half.

Then, last Friday, I tested Nokia Messaging. In Friday I set it on push, to get emails instantly. It worked phenomenally, but naturally the battery was well under 20% before the evening, with the same usage profile as above. Honestly, it was expected with push email.
Then on Saturday I changed the sync settings of Nokia Messenger to check every 15 minutes. Battery life still seemed to suck in comparison to regular IMAP, although honestly I did more stuff with the phone that day. Still, it was nothing major like movies or music, but the battery was at 50% around noon. Eventually I switched back, because battery life is more important to me than more comfortable email.

What do you think? Is there a difference in how Messaging operates, even when set to check at intervals, that causes it to drain the battery more, or did I imagine?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

hi all, I tried to search the forum for similar posts but didnt find anything. Maybe some1 mentined this already but i have an issue when charging from an PC USB port.
when charged from a PC the battery discharges in no time... even idle, no connections it just drains out.

http://stud09.technikum-wien.at/~ic0...412-132856.png

While when charging with the normal charger i get waaay more life under heavy usage.

http://stud09.technikum-wien.at/~ic0...412-132930.png

is this normal?

Thanks!

ps. i <3 this phone!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

USB ports are erratic, so the word "normal" doesn't really apply. I would say this was not unusual.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

geneven, Look his picture. He used computer usb to charge it full and also normal charger to charge it full but after using his phone after using computer usb charge it depletes battery really fast, even in idle i presume.

This is really weird. I would advise to look in xterm with top command what is happening when battery is draining that fast even if it's idle.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My guess is that something else than the charger caused the difference. Maybe different apps running on the phone (some IM's use quite a lot of battery, there also seem to be some bugs which cause the battery to drain faster until the phone is rebooted).

Re: N900 extended battery capacity
 

Hi,

Has anyone used an extended capacity battery before on the N900?

It's made in Japan so presumably is well-made although they are masters in faking such things so any experience with this particular model will be appreciated.

HIGH CAP GOLD BL-5J BATTERY FOR NOKIA N900
Made in JAPAN, 1930mAH GOLD BATTERY, UK POWER SELLER

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/HIGH-CAP-GOLD-...item4a9fc5e9c0

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Stay far far away from that. Poor quality crap for sure.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Yes, it was discussed before, this one is generic 1300mAh actually. Even its electronics does not claim higher capacity. But poor 5800 users cannot figure that out with no diagnostic tools except the phone itself ;-)
The seller deserves negative feedback for sure.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I have started using N900 recently and I had terrible battery drain issue like many reported here. I did few trials and found better results.

Here are the results of my small experiement. I got better results (nearly 24 hrs of regular use):

1) Installed the 2G/3G applet and selected dual mode.

2) Disabled the wifi connection ( I think 3G to wifi switching is consuming most power). I'm using T moblie unlimited internet connection (Dual mode). Most part I am getting 3G. Changed the search interval of internet connection to 30 minutes. (use wifi when needed and disconnect it).

3) Disabled skype and other widgets.

4) Changed the display settings to 2

BTW my email client was always active and the refresh interval was set to 30 minutes.

I am easily getting more than 12hrs of battery life on extensive usage (may be an hour of surfing and constant email checking, no skype)

-binoy

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I have recently encoutered a weird battery problem with my N900.

I've been monitoring my CPU and battery usage with the BatteryGraph program. Usually my CPU keeps at 0% usage when not in use and occasionally jumps up to 5%. That's not a problem.

Recently I installed a few new games from the extras repository, and after that I've been having issues with the battery. My battery drains from 100% to 0% in 12 hours in normal use (which would be one hour of music and 30mins of web browsing).

When I look at BatteryGraph now, it shows that the CPU is constantly at 5-10% usage even when the phone is not in use. Every once in a while I check the four most CPU consuming programs of my phone with Conky, and the programs are always the same:

Xorg: ~6% (4-12%)
Conky: ~4% (3-6%)
hildon-status-m: ~3% (2-4%)
hildon-desktop: ~2% (1-3%)

What could be the problem here? Any suggestions? I don't have any fancy widgets on my desktop, only shortcuts, contacts and web-links.

Thanks in advance.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Please how true is it that underclocking the frequency and reducing the CPU voltage wld considerably increase battery time on the device? I'm seriously cosidering this as this battery drain problem totally limits my usage of this beautiful device

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

my battery is draining fast .. iam using conky to see whats wrong ! pulseaudio is using 2% cou 1.9 memory , i dont know how to reboot ! and i think they should make it much simpler :( my battery is barely lasting 7 hours on idle :( no wifi no 3g no bluetooth ..nothing

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Sounds like a leaking program. What do you get by writing "dmesg" in the terminal. Any repetitive messages or errors? If you write "top" in terminal instead of using Conky you will see more processes.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I generally don't have battery problem, it lasts for few days, but then again I don't do much. But last night I used wifi for no more then 20 minutes(I always disconnect and it isn't on auto connect or anything) and it drained 20% of my battery.
Is that supposed to happen? I went to bed and after like 9 hours it didn't move even 5%, almost straight line.
So if I used wifi for like 2 hours it would drain completely?