I had the N900 since december and in the first couple of weeks I took it through the complete charge-fully discharge cycles to get the most out of it. A week ago I installed Battery Check app and every morning the first thing after boot I would check how much mAh it shows. The best I could see was 1214 mAh. That was only achieved by charging overnight then unplugging for 5 minutes in the morning, charging again untill it showed battery full, unplugging again for a while and charging again, after that the battery full green light came on almost instantly. If I don't follow this procedure the maximum charge the battery will get is about 1120 mAh, like today.

Yesterday I noticed that the sticker on the charger says Output 1200 mAh. What's the deal with that, can and has anyone seen their battery charged up to or close to the official 1320 mAh? Is the charger provided actually capable of charging the battery fully? Also batteries like the Mugen 2400 mAh extended battery, would they be charged properly? Sorry if any of these questions are bit noobish, I haven't got much clue when it comes to electricity

1300mAh is the maximum capacity where the number is round up to the closest digit.

you can never charge to reach that value because there is a safe limit for each battery to be charged. This will extending the life of the battery and also less heat produced during the charge, otherwise the battery will explode.

The sticker says 1200mA(NOT mAh!!!) - this is electricity current that it outputs. That is nothing to do with battery capacity(mAh). 1320 mAh means, that battery can output 1320 mA current for 1 hour. Or 660 mA for 2 hours etc. The higher the output of charger, the faster battery will top up. It is normal that the battery is not reaching its nominal capacity value. You don't have to do this gymnastics you are doing every morning, just take it off charging and use your phone.

Thanks, that's what I meant when I said I`m clueless when it comes to anything electricity Still I would expect the maximum charge to be closer to the 1300mAh, without the gymnastics I`m left with a battery close to what I had in the old N95-1, only now it`s in a much power hungrier device..

1320 mAh is a marketing number, a theoretical maximum derived from the amount of materials put into making the battery. if you open a terminal and run "lshal | grep battery" you'll see a value called battery.reporting.design, in my case it reads as 1272 mAh. This is still more than any regular user will be able to charge the battery up to.

And the number for your old phone was also a marketing number, so don't worry about that

bq27200 monitoring chip able to make accurate battery measurements on n900 is not yet used at software level

98% = maximum charge of any battery

There's also a lot of variation between batteries with the same "nominal" capacity. I'm not sure how large the maximum variation is, but it could well be around 10%. I know for a fact that a 1100mAh battery that I and many others bought (for another gadget) could vary between 1050 and 1250 mAh between individual batteries, if not more. (Some sellers even specified it as 1300mAh, which was probably a bit much, but could happen, while some sold it as 1500mAh, which would be a lie.)

a 16GB micro SD is not really 16 but 14.29GB
an 8GB flash drive is not 8 but 7.4GM

therefore a 1320mah li-on battery is not 1320 if fully charged but......something like....im not so sure but that's 1280mah (96%) at least.

I find that using the little battery indicator icon probably gives you a better idea of how much power is left than a % indicator or mAh counter. My old palm had a similar gauge that also gave you a "fake percentage" that I found to be the most useful gauge of remaining power.

For example, right now mine says 70%, less than 3/4 power, but the indicator icon shows 7/8 bars, which is a more accurate representation of how much power is left in my experience.