Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

You should have got a netbook for half the price or better a cheaper phone like nokia 5800. Smartphone battery life is not up to the task yet.

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

its not nokias fault that your expectations were way too high....

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

Before the thread drifts completely off-topic:
I'm persuaded that enabling the online availability uses a disproportionate amount of power. We might consider to file a bug. Anybody interested to connect some network logs and powertop information?

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

at least be happy you can change the battery as well as run skype in the bsckground. I know a lot of people who have spent much more than you and yet lack this 'privilege' :)

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

I'd guess that there is nothing one can do with it. only workaround would be push servers a la iPhone, but the same problem has been forever with symbian phones etc. since 6630 IMs online have meant half the battery life compared to IM offline for me.

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

Skype doesn't do that to me. Only the combination of the Twitter and Skype plugins seriously affect battery life for me such that I'd be in danger of the phone lasting less than a day with my normal usage. It will usually run about 30 hours if I don't use it a lot, 16 to 24 if I use it more. Much less if I watch a bunch of videos, obviously.

I'm always logged in to Ovi, Skype, and two SIP accounts.

This is on WiFi and EDGE.

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

Any evidence that a 5800 with Skype, AIM, Yahoo, MSN and Facebook constantly on would last better?

My friend actually has a 5800 and uses none of the above, just a lot of texting and calling and its ALWAYS flat when he comes round. I am not aware of ANY device that can do all this and last a whole day.

I have noticed one thing though, my battery drains pretty bad if I leave things open even though they are not doing anything. Makes sense, its full Linux so there is no such thing as "not doing anything". Now I make sure to close applications I am not using, especially the web browser and media player, it seems to improve battery life considerably.

Still, I do not think 8 hours constant use is not unreasonable considering the size of the device. Sure I had hoped I could manage a whole day constantly playing music, texting, always online on IM and occasional web browsing, but I was not remotely surprised to find my aggressive use means I get more like half a day. A netbook/ULVPC with comparable battery life has a battery the physical size of 3-4 N900s, which is possibly 20-30 N900 batteries in size. Its not like it can pluck power out of thin air (although with the amount of RFI these days I'm surprised you can't).

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

Skype and gTalk protocols are pretty wasteful when it comes to communication with their servers, Skype esspecially - pings and status requests are very frequent and have quite large footprint (just two accounts will cost you approx 1MB of data / hr) - so they are constantly utilizing the connection, and that power has to come from somewhere. At least Skype promised to trim their protocol (and not using your connection as a gateway as they actually do from time to time which can eat tens of MB per hour) for mobile usage, since more and more phones are coming with VoIP abilities. As for the gTalk, since it's essentially a Jabber protocol, optimizations can be made but there is no much room for improvement.

Still, there is no pocketable device out there that can keep real, non-relayed connections to various IM and VoIP services (not to mention the integration), longer than the N900. If you are not happy, your expectations are way too larger than the current commercialy available technology can provide.

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

That is interesting. I am using Skype and ICQ (1 account each). I now disabled skype to see if ICQ alone does not eat so much battery.

Still there is a screaming need for something similar to the Nokia Energy Profiler on Symbian. With something like that you could get exact numbers and would not need to test for days and still speculate afterwards.

Best regards,
Corwin

Re: Availability in online mode eats battery
 

I had way high expectations by expecting the device to last me through the day?