Re: N900 battery life
 

I'm very interested in seeing reviews of N900 battery life on production units (with SIM in :) once they start getting out in the wild. Is there any other site or thread tracking this? If it is at LEAST no worse than my iPhone 3G I'll be ok with it, but I won't take a phone that is any worse.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Might have to wait a few days for the batteries to cycle full - low battery a few times to get closer to full capacity.

Today though it lasted from 7am - 6pm with a bit of photography/music/games while showing it off to ppl at work. 3G on entire day with msn/yahoo/nokia messaging connected at all times before it started giving low battery warnings. Had microusb cable anyway. Without the photo/video taking and games it would have easily lasted 14hrs of just messaging.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Note that some people, in other threads, are advising against cycling the battery all the way down. I've no idea what to believe.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Those posts are utter b/s. You can't be paranoid 24/7 in fear that your device might switch off because it has no battery! And if that was the case, wth? Aren't we in 2009? Isn't something like that a bit of a pre-mature sort of b/s. Something like that shouldn't affect the device at all. People just say too much before thinking.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Hey guys,

I have an N900 and my battery life is horrible, it doesnt even last more than 5 hours with very little use. Ive seen a few others with similar battery life but most people have much better battery life, so it could be some defective units. Im calling Nokia on Monday to have it replaced.
Before I do that, anyone have any ideas as to why my battery life is so horrible? Yes Im on the latest firmware and even reflashed a few times.

Re: N900 battery life
 

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-12.htm

what the link basicly outlines; firstly the n900 uses a l-ion type battery.

The battery doesn't like extreams of both high power, and low power. Let the power get too low and you could kill the little lions (cute name) for good, at very least you will permanently lose some of the capacity of your battery

conversely, when charging, don't go all the way to 100% full, unplug it at 80 - 90% doing this will give you less usage time during the following day, but you will extend the overall life of the battery. Once every 500 or so charges you should go to 100%.

People saying that for the "all important" first charge need to give it at least 12 hrs are wrong. Your first charge is / should be no different to any other charge, take it to just under 100%

charge cycles do not matter, intact they should be purposefully discarded, what your little lions want is to be kept moving, they don't want to go hungry, and they don't want to be over fed. Keeping your n900 plugged in and at 100% all the time doesn't let your lions move, not letting them move will kill them. Regular charges are good, the more often the better, 10% here 23% there is perfect, keep your lions moving!

Your battery will last many charge cycles. A cycle doesn't mean 100% all the way down to 0%
if you went from say, 70% to 60% 10 times, right there is a valid charge cycle, and it keeps your lions moving

Re: N900 battery life
 

mines was pretty bad also, but after i tune my brightness down one notch and turn off my 3g when i'm not using it, it actually get by almost a full day uses.

but compare to my e61i it's miles away, but then the e61i isn't a powerful as the n900

Re: N900 battery life
 

lol sorry i rather just be more relaxed and max out my battery and if it ever get too bad i'll spend $30 for a new battery on newegg... :D

Re: N900 battery life
 

I believe modern battery charge monitoring software already accounts for that to some extent, and will not allow you to charge the battery to "true" 100% or "true" 0% in normal circumstances.

So you should be fine charging the battery to the point where the phone says "Ok, I've finished charging now".

And if the electronics are at all sensible, it should stop charging the battery at that point automatically.

Re: N900 battery life
 

How about if you used it in a similar way to the e61i? Would the battery be comparable since you would not be using the extra features?

Re: N900 battery life
 

Well, my battery life is pretty good. Ranges from 6:30-8 hours. My first usage was about 7-8 hours. I was using a minimum of 3 hours of wifi and the rest on 3G-3.5G(if that matters) while streaming music constantly before it went dead on me. When I wasn't using anything what so ever, I got over 9 hours of battery life and it was still going(had to charge at that point because it was dangerously low, lol). But I have to say, if you're using the device as a music player, don't bet on it because it's pretty bad. It went dead on me after 5 hours with about an hour of 3.5G data usage. It drains even faster than wifi....

Re: N900 battery life
 

I would hope it doesn't let you get to these true 100 and 0%'s too, it just that there is a lot of confusion over how *best* to treat these batteries.

Personally I go up to the 100% and then after my day (on current 3gs) am usually down to about 20% I then go all the way back to 100% - however, my point is that if I can grab extra juice during the day, that is only a good thing, and you don't need to feel bad about not giving it a full charge

Re: N900 battery life
 

From what I've read, which is unfortunately not authoritative, modern phone batteries + charging systems are much better for that and it's fine to do that. With old (10 years old) phones it was sometimes recommended to fully discharge from time to time, but I think that is no longer recommended.

I.e. you are right, there's a lot of confusion :p

Re: N900 battery life
 

That's confusing. Are you saying that streaming music does not drain the battery much, but playing music drains the battery quickly?

It seems unlikely but it's possible. If it's happening like that, it's probably a software issue in the music player.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Your talking about discharging correctly etc but that should effect the battery over time, Ive had the phone for 5 days or so lol Im just trying to figure out if Im the only one with a horrible battery life since Ive heard of others having their battery last 12 hours or longer while staying on 3G and using the phone regularly the entire time. So anyone have a unit and able to use it normally without having to charge the phone 2-3 timesdaily?

Re: N900 battery life
 

Think we might have defective units lol But lets see if anyone else has a unit and has a different experiance. You shouldnt have to turn off 3G to make it last the night...

FYI I did 3 posts on this site from the phone over the last 20 minutes and my battery has dropped a notch already...

Re: N900 battery life
 

I went out today with a full charge. Tried to get noksnes running a game for a few minutes but its pretty flaky. Then I played Urquan Masters for a bit. Listened to a bit of music. After maybe a 40 minute train ride, battery was almost at 50%. This was around 3:45pm EST. The half charge kept me going with shooting off an email with 1mb attachment, one brief call, checking the phone periodically, a few min of web surfing, a few pictures (with flash).

I think we'll see battery life improve as apps get more polished.

EDIT: oh yeah, I started getting battery warnings walking home from the train a few minutes ago (11-11:30pm EST)

Re: N900 battery life
 

What time in the morning did it come off charger?
Are you running AT&T or Tmobile (3g or edge)? Also any apps constantly connected to internet or polling every X mins?

Re: N900 battery life
 

The complete cycle method is generally used to calibrate the charging circuitry in multicell laptop batteries, as the batteries in mobile devices like ours generally only have a single cell it's actually pointless (and marginally harmfu) to do complete discharge cycles (as there's nothing to calibrate).

Re: N900 battery life
 

I could use my e61i for days heavily (wifi, music, and sometimes movies) and not charge it but with the n900 i doubt i'll past even one day.

But i can't say for sure cause i've never drain my n900 yet. Just the first two bars goes down really quick but not sure about the last two it could last longer.

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.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Screen brightness makes a huge difference on the battery life of both my laptop and my Zaurus, so definitely set it as low as is comfortable for you.

It only takes one overcharge to really damage a lithium battery, so if the charging circuitry is bad, it could lead to a battery with really poor capacity.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Try it again tonight with the email autocheck turned off. After all you don't need the email checking every 15 mins while you're asleep anyway. If that solves it, you have your answer.

You might also want to look at this app

Re: N900 battery life
 

Non battery related question does the N900's keyboard is backlighted??

Re: N900 battery life
 

Non-battery answer - yes. ;)

Re: N900 battery life
 

thnx RevdKathy for ur non battery RELATED answer.

Re: N900 battery life
 

This Quote is non battery RELATED.

(sry, just had to. :))

Re: N900 battery life
 

I am rather puzzled about the great difference in battery life that users are reporting. I think the only thing we can do is just wait for more people to actually get the device. Nokia havent said anything about why shipments of the N900 has basically frozen or at least delayed. I am patiently waiting.

Re: N900 battery life
 

btw, is it possible to disable the keyboard backlight? I won't need it during the day.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Flip side of such a complex and capable device, its so easy to kill the battery without being able to pinpoint the cause. The terrible battery life I got in the previous examples it mixed with days where I get pretty good battery life. I think we'll see battery life improve greatly once the N900 is readily available and developers etc. all have one and apps can be more thoroughly/widely tested.

Overall, given the capabilities of the N900 and the size of the battery I'd say battery life is pretty good. Although I see a good argument now for all the people who wanted the ability to create more than 2 profiles. BATTERY SAVER profiles, hehe.

Re: N900 battery life
 

Just a few notes from personal experience.

If you mess at all with the WiFi power settings, your battery life will really, really suck.

Also, beware desktop widgets that display info that gets updated regularly. I was warned at the Summit by people in the know that the Facebook widget isn't very power-optimised.

If you need better battery life, turn off e-mail checking, too. I've heard reports from hard-core users that it can really help your battery life.

Taking a lot of photos really seems to hammer the battery.

Best thing to have is that "load-applet" mentioned above and watch the left indicator. If it stays at four squares, with the top one flashing red, for any length of time, your battery is headed for a premature demise.

I notice that occasionally (seems it might be related to XChat? Not sure), some mysterious process called hildon-xinput-sounds hammers my CPU and I have to kill it or suffer a quick battery death.