Just have a few questions:

I got my N900 yesterday, used it a bit, drained the battery and recharged.

i had the phone on standby overnight (12:30am till around 7:30am this morning). No dent in the battery despite having my alarm ringing for a while, and I shut off my wireless and data connection while asleep.

Today from 7:30am I have:

1) Uploaded a show onto my N900 via USB (battery charged a bit during this time, around 8 minutes?)
2) Listened to music / tweaked around with the phone while in the car to work.
3) Listened to music off the phone for around.... 30 minutes?
4) Downloaded touch search app, and pixel pipe (registered an account which required me to load 2 browser windows). Tested uploading a photo to my facebook account.
5) Watched an episode of Heroes on my phone (with about 5 minutes left to the episode).

Battery is already at 50%, and its only 10:30am.

Is this considered standard or heavy usage? Because if this is standard, I'm quite disappointed with the battery life.

Note:
1) I shut off data whenever im not using it
2) Have wifi set to 10mw
3) Brightness on 2
4) Have weather update every 4 hours
5) No widgets on my desktop

EDIT: does installing apps of any size (whether 400kb or 5mb) require a lot of battery power?

how long was your episode of Heros running for? The more you use the features on the N900 the more energy is required. Lots of video and sound will drain the battery quicker as it would on a laptop.

How many chain cycles has your battery gone through. mine dramatically improved after about 5 or 6 cycles.

im on my second full charge.
1. drained battery after getting the phone yesterday
2. charged it during lunch for 2 hrs, was fully charged after as green light was flashing
3. drained it again within like... 5 hours (but was heavily installing applications and setting up the phone).
4. charged again to full

Heroes episodes are around 42 minutes. I paused it at the 37 mark or so. Used EARPHONES though, so not sure if that extends the battery life since less energy is required compared to speakers right? All the music and video I mentioned was through earphones btw!

Sounds as though your battery is still bedding in so keep an eye on things after a few more days.

I've not noticed earphones making a huge reduction in power requirements over the speakers but I suppose it would help.

If you watched half an hour of video that would be a fair amount of power but different codec's use differing power requirements. I've found recoding to the same size for the device in question also saves memory as well as energy converting onthe fly.

Summary: wait for a few more cycles before worrying about the battery, it does seem to get a lot better

Why do you think the battery will become more capable and power the phone for longer with the same usage pattern after a few days? I don't know of anything in the battery technology that would lead to that.

I do know that my battery does get better after the first week with a new device once m experiementation falls off, but given his scenario I don't see that as likely. My experience was like the first poster's, with a roughly similar battery usage.

There have been several threads documenting this on the forum. Personal experience on two batteries with the N900 on my device too.

It's not the battery iteslf... it's the sensors that get better information about the battery state. Thus it looks like an overall improvement.