Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

You can set your 2G/GSM only (i.e. no 3G) in Settings->Phone: Network Mode

10mW transmission power for WLAN in Settings->Internet Connections, Connections-button, edit any WLAN connection, get to last page of wizard, choose advanced, "other"-tab, select 10mW transmission power (setting is valid for all WLAN connections).

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I don't recall i believe in it? I just thought how ironic it was but if you didn't get it then ehhh

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

is it better to use a third party im client for the battery?

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Anyone comment on how stable and power conservative pidgin is?
I know fring has a reputation of being the least power hungry on Symbian but its not ready for Maemo yet.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Really wish I knew why some people get poor battery life. I myself pulled the Nokia off the charger at 8 AM this morning, it is now almost midnight and I still have half a battery left.

I also listened to quite a bit of music today and talked on the phone for at least an hour and a half. *shrug+ It's baffling to me. I can tell you I use 10mW wifi instead of 100 and I'm on the Edge network a lot.

This whole post made by the N900. I also played airport for about 30 minutes and Exploder for about 15.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I think Fring has an advantage in that communication goes through fring's own protocol through fring's own servers, and fring's servers handle the connection to msn and such. This allows Fring to optimize the phone<->Internet protocol for maximum power savings. This can be a factor of 10 difference on 3G, even if the amount of bytes transfered stays the same.

Once I find some spare time, possibly around 2035 or so, I'm going to write a proxy to cut down on IRC's power use a bit...

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

but n900 isn't sold as a phone.

do you use IM -accounts?

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Are you logged on to your IM accounts during the day? Is there a green ball next to your battery icon at the top? If not, then your battery life is perfectly normal.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

why are people comparing a 2.4" screen with a 3.5" one? the larger screen eats a lot of battery compared to the smaller one

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

You know what irritates me the most? Nokia launches a phone/ computer called N900 and promotes the fact that you have the world in your pocket (always in contact with your contacts, e-mail, internet). Well, when i turn the world on on my phone, it dies within 1 day. Yes, i have updated to the latest firmware. So, i have to turn stuff off to preserve my battery. This sounds a bit like a paradox, right?

I also own a HTC Hero and with 3G/ HSPDA on constantly, IM connected, i only have to charge the phone every 3rd day! I am using my HTC Hero more and the moment and stuffed the N900 in de closet. That's how fed up i am with the phone at the moment.

In conclusion; if you launch a phone like N900 which needs to be connected to the internet to fully function, please..please..please...make sure that you - at least - make it through the day on a charge!

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

i have to agree with the Battery Live Problems i have to charge my n900 any night to have it ready for the day. However i just tried to switch off 3g i hope this will bring more livetime.

Another Problem is that you cant use it right with one hand i just want to be able to make a call with one hand but also the screen locks in landscape so i have to use 2 hands. So i am not able to use the portait Phonefunctions..

best regards Crown

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Hi guys its my firts post so hello nice to meet you:) I just want add from myslef that Im quite satisfied with the battery life in my N900.
I bought a week ago from Carphone Warehouse (Vodafone) and after getting it out of the box I charged it fully 3 times for 12 hours. Now I can easily get 24 hours of heavy use.

I go to work @ 9:30 pm, from 10 pm til 2 am listen to music on headphones. 2-2:30 (lunch) i browse net on 3G, some youtube + a few tries in Angry BIrds. then from 3 to 5:45 i listen to music and go home. At home while bathing I have a cigarette + 15 minutes of news via Wifi. Then I go to bed, check for any new repos, and still have 1-2 bars of battery easily. Last wkend I didnt go to work, charged it from empty on saturday morning and it lasted me till monday afternoon. Oh yeah I did some photos sat evening.

Got brightness @ 2, no system sounds, no haptic, always on 2G+Skype on, only @ night i switch for 3G for 30 minutes. Wifi scanning off. No animated widgets on main screen (like fbook or rss). I also try not to wake it up too much when its suspended (like checking time or sth).
Of course all of this dont include texting and calling (around 15 txt/20 mins of talk).

I think its not the problem with the device but how YOu use it. I know it;s a Internet tablet which is meant to stay all time online but hey dont expect miracles from such small battery...

I have idea that can help you - get a desktop charger with spare battery (Ive seen a set of charger + 2 batteries on ebay for around Ł8). That will make Your life easier.

Sorry for length of this post and for my grammar but English is not my native language.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Good post - nice that it hasn't deteriorated into the usual WE HATE NOKIA or SELL THE 'DEVICE' THEN type arguements :)

Heres my 2 cents....

As a rubbish comparison....my laptop is a brand new dell and I get 3 hours out of the battery with wifi on....

With proper manual management I can scrape a day out of the N900 tops (read as 16 hrs) (and yes the phone should be able to do this...). Things like auto disconnect of 3.5g internet connection would help.

No Portrait mode - a right royal pain when texting or using the phone (need address book with ABC search like in when in landscape mode)

I have recently found 4 bars on the display brightness helps no end over 5 bars. Also make sure GPS is disabled.

I've got a 2nd battery and keep a car charger in glovebox and a usb line at work so I can top it up.

Compare the battery life now to my N95 8GB and its not far off as that also need charging after about 16hrs!

I'm hoping and seeing things are improving. Theres a way to go but its moving in the right directions

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Well just to compare I had HTC Touch HD (3.8" screen), Nokia E90 (4" screen), N95 8GB, E71, SE P910i etc.. You get the idea gone through many of the latest powerful smartphones some with large screens and all lasted at the very least 2 days with light to moderate usage. If I'm lucky I can get 24hrs with the n900 on the same usage.

BTW, I do like most things about the n900 except the terrible battery life.

We end users shouldn't have to work out how to fix battery life because of bugs.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

hi everyone! I might have misread, but what's this talk about 900mah? Mine has 1320mah and right now I'm on the second day of use without recharge. Allways connected and I'd say I'm a real heavy user. I bought a spare battery to go with the phone because I thought it would have poor battery life, but I have yet to even charge the spare one. I for one am REALLY satisfied with the battery life! :)

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

What we really need is Nokia Energy Profiler!!!

http://store.ovi.com/content/73403FE...40050A87326D82

Shame this is S60 only...

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Something which can affect battery life of any phone is signal strength. If you're in an area with poor or no reception your battery will run dry much faster. This is because your phone will ramp it's power up searching for the network, or trying to keep hold of a weak network. On a device like the N900 which will have a high drain already, something like that can push it over the edge.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I am rather curious how some people, especially heavy users get good battery life. I get the kind I expected. If I stay at home with wifi, it's not empty at 22, but I slap in in the charger anyway. If I'm on 3g a lot I have to charge it at 18 or 19. I get up at 7:15, my day lasts about 19 hours.

Of course it depends on usage, but I'm a pretty heavy user. I'm always online with skype/gtalk/ovi and have witter updating every 15 minutes, 3 email accounts uppdating every 30 minutes, almost constantly chatting, messaging, mailing, tweeting, browsing, playing freeciv or the dig, reading and posting on tmo, chatting #maemo, listening to music, locally or on spotifty or streaming from my server. I talk on the phone for about 30m each day.

I'm actually pretty impressed that i sometimes get a whole day out of it. I find that battery life depends on net traffic, where traffic over 3g takes much more battery than wifi, and having device screen on eats a little. CPU doesn't affect it that much imo. GPS kills it fast.

I carry the charger adapter in my pocket, have a charger in my cars and have the original charger by the bed, and a couple of old nok chargers in other places (by sofa, by computer, at work), so I can charge the phone if I know I will be requiring lots of battery later.

I'm not sure whether you think this good or bad battery life, but it works pretty well for me, but it would be nice to not have to think about it at all, but I think that's a utopia with my kind of use.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I got up at 6:00 am this morning and switched on the device. Now it's 9:33 and it's already dying on me. Just to mention: it's the second charge (i just had the thing 2 days), and I've been browsing, listening to some music and rss-ing, not more than an hour total. Availibility was ON and email is checked every 1 hour.

is it faulty? because this is just not acceptable

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

disabled msn & google talk, gained about 100% battery life.

I think battery life is very impressive. E71 lasted much longer but it didn't allow convenient web browsing, quake 3 etc.

yesterday took my device from charger 6:00, MfE syncs from 8:00 every 15 minutes, a little browsing, installing software etc (>100mb dl via 3g) and 19:00 got first battery low warning when I had played games about 1,5 hours (gweled, just started with Quake 3). Continued playing for a while and after that googled assasins greed 2 puzzle instructions etc and 23:15 device shut down because of empty battery....

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I don't use msn, but have heard complaints that it's a battery muncher. Anyway intergrated im is one of my favorite things on the N900, so you'll have to pry that from my cold dead hands ;)

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

That doesn't sound right. Just off the top of my head, do you perhaps have the gps enabled, trying desperately to get a signal while indoors?

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Same here, 1 desktop, no widgets, little wifi/gsm, music etc.
4-6 hours and i have about 20% left.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

i agree about signal strength. A weak signal means the phone is fishing more for a decent signal and hops between 2 and 3g. This happened to me when I switched to my 3 sim. Battery life plummetted. Gone back to Voda and its recovered quite a bit actually.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

As soon as I saw the advert of it for the first time I immediately fell in love in it. Pointing downsides of the battery seems a bit funny to me because people seem to miss great functionality that this device has. I feel bit sad that I was always a windows fan scared of linux cause now maybe I could mod it on my own, but I have to rely on other people like you. But Im slowly learning :) I even installed Easy Debian on it :).

That makes my point, I was always kind of a mobile freak and I love to test every new stuff that is such widely promoted. My previous one was I8910 HD, but now its gone to my wife , I had G1 as well, N95, N97 and really rally I love my N900!!! I would never swap it for anything else now. I liked Symbian, but Maemo is abso-fcukin-lutely FANTASTIC.

Please stop complaining about the battery if you want to use your mobile for 5 days buy a N3310. I was totallz expecting this after seeing possibilities of this baby. Im telling You, use it wisely and it will give you so much love...

Look at my settings, I think thats a basic stuuf, but maybe somebody missed something?

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

This was just an experiment:
I can get 3 days with one charge, 3g on, data connection over 3.5 always on, MFE sync every 30 mins between 9-18; weather sync every 4 hours. Browsing, youtube, music, no more than an hour per day. Phone calls about an hour also continuous. Also I put it offline in the night. For me this is very reasonable.

In Bucharest we don't have any problems with signal by the way, everywhere is pretty strong. For example I have an E51 which I charged once per week in Bucharest and every two days in Paris with the same usage.

For those who get less than a day with this kind of using scenario, I think you should return your phone.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

After Update battery issue for me is fixed. Maybe due to some apps that were wiped and I don't want to reinstall em. Also I followed the nice thread about fixing the battery life.
I charged the phone and was listening to audiobook at night thru wifi. The book is based on Flash. After 2h the book stops and when I wake up in the morning I have almost full bar on phone with 3 opened browsers running. Listen to Inet Radio in the car for about 45mins, did not turn off 3g at work, a couple of calls, a couple of utube videos, and my battery started crying only around 5pm. I would not call it a bad battery life.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

chrismint I actually had the same problem. There is a work around for now until Nokia plugs that hole. What you have to do is go to Settings Internet Connections and Turn off Select Wi-Fi when available. Make sure you have ur cellular APN as the default for connect Automatically. What happens is that whenever you connect to wifi even though ur phone is out of range or ur wifi hotspot is keeps searching and aht drains the battery I tested it and by turning off switch to wi-fi when available and putting my APN as the connect automatically option I have had over 12 hrs so far...and I have MFE which syncs automaticalls. If you connect to Wi-Fi disconnect and then reboot your device and connect back to ur Cellular APN. That should help for now.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I run MSN and Skype IM all the time and with the above settings it actually works. More info can be found here:http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36438

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

It takes ~5 charging from empty to full before battery life really gets better. I do not know why it like that but something to do charging program inside n900 to calibrate itself to battery.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

djjaku why you have touch screen vibration on?

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

no i don't think to have it enabled but just to make sure, what's exactly "off"? ehehe i still didn't get it completely.

Also, it just died now and I am trying to recharge it with an old Nokia recharger and adapter... but it's not turning on and the light blinks quickly... getting frustrated

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I have to agree, that "always on" (3G) sucks the battery dry within a few hours (I'd say 10 to 16 hours depending on usage of the phone) , but I usually can make it through the day.

I cannot agree with comparisons to other phones like the E71. I do have an E71 too and I really love it. Nevertheless, when "always on" (3G) the E71's battery is empty within twice the time, so let's say 25 to 40 hours with the battery having a slightly higher capacity.
Of course, this is definitely longer than the N900. However, it absolutely does not offer me all the possibilities the N900 does. That's starts with the screen and ends with the input capabilities. Compared to the iPhone: it may have a longer runtime, but again... in my opinion it's not as pleasant to use.

Still, battery runtime is an issue, but in my opinion, it's not that bad. As said, one big disadvantage the N900 has: it's so convenient to use you can't let your hands of it :)

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I think the whole thread clearly shows that we need a proper way to measure the used energy in a way the Nokia Energy Profiler allowed on Symbian.

This way we would be able to see what exactly takes the power.

Best regards,
Corwin

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I have gps off, gsm only, 2 bar brightness, no widgets. If I leave IM off (either msn or pidgin) I can get a maximum of 3 hours web browsing via 2G gprs and then the battery dies. If I have msn online it is probably 1.5 hours, is this normal? IM really seems to draw alot of battery even on standby, very unfortunate since it shortens the life too much to be usable...

I wonder if leaving this running in a browser instead will use less battery than IM or pidgin..... http://m.ebuddy.com/

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

Good battery test results here: http://mynokiablog.com/2009/12/12/fu...3g-connection/

That guy got 3.5 hours talk time. Most of that time the display would be off. Realistically, browsing power load is not less then talk, but more, since its likely the CPU is doing work, and the display is on.

Like I said before, you can count on 3 hours of fully powered up and running time (ie, data link or wifi, screen on, cpu humming along) or about 450ma average power load, which get you to 1350mah total capacity used in 3 hours.

If you've got IM or some other network connected process running all the time, the device will do its best to keep the actual duty cycle down to some smaller % of fully on, such that your average load is in the low 100s or even high double digits. "Standby" load where its powered up and able to receive a call should be under 50ma for ~27 hours between charges.

if you're running even 10% of the time fully powered up (again, I am guessing 450ma as its probably in the ball park) then you're drawing (450*6 + 50*54)/60=90ma/hour on average, for 15 hours total run time.

Add in an hour or so of actual full time use (some email, some surfing, for example) and your total time between charges is now 11 hours (1 hour at 450ma, leaving 900mah, or 10 hours.)

My actual usage falls in the range of 11-15 hours off charger so my usage pattern is between those two cases.

Use it for a couple hours, and you've got 900mah used, 450mah left for "idle" @ 90ma, or 5 more hours, for 7 hours total. For example, you talk for an hour, and browse/email/im/whatever on network for an hour, your n900 will be out of gas after 7 hours total off charger.

I think these are fairly typical of all high end devices. It tracks exactly with the HTC VGA or bigger CDMA devices I've used, and it matches the iPhone 3G as well.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

I guess I got too used to the E71 with it's great battery life. Of course such comparisons are not fair seeing that the E71 did not have a large touchscreen, cpu power etc.
It's too bad Nokia didn't ship the n900 with the same large battery as the E71, perhaps in the Maemo 6 device :p

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

What are your Availability settings and are you using Skype? When I am available, it seems that the GPS may be running even though I am set to "district" rather than street level of info. There's also the traffic updating Skype with changes in location. There seems to be less battery used when I am set to "not available".

These are early thoughts only, and not proven.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

i have 4 desktop, a lot of shortcuts, a few widgets, 5 bars of brightness.
i used to have 3g turned off (gsm only).
now i turned dual-mode on yesterday and to be honest, i didnt felt any much difference (except the internet being much faster)
but i'll keep an eye on it the next few days.

Re: Seriously disalusioned with phone and battery life...
 

After the PR1.1 OTA update my battery life, especially with WiFi was down to under 6hrs on standby.
Reflash was not as daunting as I thought. So I would give it a try, but make sure you back up first.

Here is the flashing guide I used.