that is being applied well and N900 is switching smoothly between wifi and 3G. now Email set to 10min update for 3 accounts + weather set for daily update + ovi contacts all consumed 11.2MB over 3 days the surge in consumption was yesterday night for 30MB. The only modification i made yesterday was adding an RSS source and adding RSS as a widget on desktop.

Hmm... Are you taking into account changes in volume/size of e-mail and RSS feeds received? That still is quite a difference, but there should be reasonable reasons for it. This probably isn't relevant in your case, but just to point out, if you want to live on the edge and test out alpha/beta-quality software from -testing or -devel, be aware that that may have adverse effects in this regard, or others. I had a seemingly-harmless system daemon I was testing apparently eat my battery in half a day yesterday, and if you were to use unstable software that made use of the network, Badness might ensue.

Have you added any podcast software that may have pulled a new episode down over night?

I am back on 3G for 2 hours now, total consumption is 400KB active applications: Nokia Email + Ovi contacts + Weather.

disabled RSS...

nope the last thing i changed before this sudden surge was adding an RSS feed and adding RSS to the desktop. i am trying to narrow it down...

I heard that people at Nokia Headquarter like to secretly tune in your front webcam to check you out while you sleep. That explains the battery drain.

creeee...pppy....
and No, they don't. :P

Those of you trying to figure out how to disable image downloading in RSS... there is NO global "no images" option. (No, the Image cache option does not turn off image downloading.)

If you want to stop the images from downloading, you will have to disable images on each and every feed. You can do this by getting info on your feed (the big i on the toolbar) and unchecking the images checkbox. You will have to do this for each and every feed as they are downloaded automatically by default.

Also, I believe there are other issues with the RSS feed reader... I'll have to look at the bugs again because I know it has some strange problems.

Doesn't the phone also check all the repositories once per day, if you have all the testing/devel etc. repositories installed that will eat several megabytes.
Just did apt-get update and even when many of the repositories were skipped (I think apt-get can check the date of the repository list and skip it if it has already been downloaded), but still it used 5021kB.

thanks DeeGee well u have pointed out something very important...

now the question is Are the repositories update done in the background without our control? and if yes how can we disable it?

5 hours have passed and my consumption increased by 1MB only... so far so good!