Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

I can make the N900 charge meter display 100% for 2 days :)

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Battery is 3.7V, 1.32Ah, so a full charge is abut 5 Wh; it's provided with a switching power supply, which are typically around 90% efficient, so let's be generous and say 6Wh. At the US average price of 12 cents/kWh, that means 0.072 cents to fully recharge the N900.

No, that's not "free" either, but there's no way to complain about such costs without sounding incredibly lame.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Test 3)

Same characteristics but without IM enabled, I list them again

- Wifi disabled, 3G enabled, no IM accounts enabled, kernel ideal loaded, 2 desktops, widget of calendar, three contacts in desktop, two widgets-like indicating the internet IP and the battery percentage, brightness to the 1 position, display almost all the time disconnected. Mail autocheck each 30 min.
- A not so-constant slope seen in BatteryGraph app, like repetitive cycles of higher slope I guess coinciding with navigation

Well, last time with 3G and IM enabled (brightness 3), I had a battery decrease of a 42% in 2h 46min -> -0.253% / min

Now, this are the results, -66 % in 4h 15min -> 0.259% / min

(detailed)
- 7:55 90%
mail
casual navigation (< 5 min)
3 SMS sent
- 8:13 83%
nothing
- 9:02 74%
mail erase some messages
sms received
- 10:13 68%
mail erase some messages
navigation 5 min
- 11:03 48%
mail erase some messages
navigation 5 min
- 12:10 24%



So, conclusions, having the two IM accounts enabled has not implied a significant difference, has it? Or if not, perhaps I have had this time a little more activity, but since both IM were disabled I have kept the same battery decrease. In any case, the differences are minimum, in my opinion the price you pay to be connected is not huge, but rather acceptable.

What I think is not acceptable, is that with such a minimum activity, the n900 is so empty of energy.

This time we have moved from subjectivity to objectivity, then I have two questions:
a) Is this a normal behaviour of the n900?
b) Is this a reasonable behaviour of the n900, taking into account what the other devices offer? Just to decide which position the n900 deserves in an hypothetical top chart.

As a subjective note, I had the same battery-sensations with the n900 normal-clocked and without extra-devel enabled, two options that however I find absolutely necessary to have a decent n900 experience.

EDIT: No catorise or similar installed, since I read time ago that it had a bug that could induce a high and constant CPU usage

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

If i did understand your test case then i would say that something fishy is going on. Only difference between test 1 and test 2 is that in test 2 you have IM accounts disabled. That alone should give you less drainage compared to test 1. Hmmm...btw. IIRC some people had problems with ip-widget and also battery %-widget. I do not know current sitsuation, but when we are speaking about widgets (constantly running on background) i would remove as many as possible to be sure.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Yes this is not acceptable behaviour. And very very much thank you for providing detailed answers. This is how you can help yourself and other people here. Also you can export graph from batterygraph (from top menu) to make next time even detailed. This also helps to track battery drainage for yourself.

What i have seen here and from my own experiences with N900 i would say that you have some weird drainage going on. Do not know if it´s because of custome kernel or some application on background. I would also recommend to list applications by running in xterm
maemo-list-user-packages

As i said before I think that you are experiencing some sort of bug either from 3rd party app or from official maemo OS or app.

There is powertop named application in extras-devel which can help in finding out what is causing battery drainage on your phone.
http://maemo.org/packages/view/powertop/
minimize xterm and go to desktop, lock n900, leave it on table for couple of minutes, open it up and research powertop output. Most of time device should be in sleep.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

i installed powetop about two weeks ago but have not figured out how to use it. any suggestions?

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Did you manage to run it?
It´s shell application. It´s pretty geeky and i do not understand it+s ouput fully, but i do understand/see when something is not right. Hard to explain :)

http://maemo.org/packages/view/powertop/
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/powertop.php
http://www.linuxpowertop.org/powertop.php

Use google and power search to learn more. And run it with different usage scenarios on your N900.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

I have not. I will look into the links you posted, thanks. The first i have already and it is useless as far as usage goes.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Wiki seems to have some explanation about powertop output (see the Analysis tools section):

http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Software_Power_management

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Um.. you oughta do something wrong. I let my n900 automatically switch to flight mode during night. It uses aprox 50mAh during that time.. About 8-10h that is. It means about 4% drain for 10 hours. Your iphone takes 3% on 2 hours. Do the math.... I am guessing you have configured your ideal profile wrong.. or not configured it at all.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Well, a copy/paste of a powertop run would be nice

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Thx for the answers :)
. powertop pasted
http://paste.org/pastebin/view/21570

After this, and while I am preparing to flash the device, I've uninstalled the next apps:
- qtirreco (I didn't need it, not related but just in case, I note it)
- Wifi Switcher

And I still have (that I will uninstall if the situation does not improve)
- Queen BeeCon Widget
- Personal IP address
- ConnectNow internet connection switch

. After this, powertop again, pasted
http://paste.org/pastebin/view/21571

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that consumes the battery within hours
 

my 900 is getting connection of wlan but no web page is opening pls help me

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

this is epic fail from you. because error margins are huge when we are talking time spans not measured by clock but in ones head.

e: btw I am getting 8+ hours 3g constantly on, online in facebook and gtalk 24/7 plus couple hours surfing in the internet...

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Okey. Thank you again for these logs!

----
Just to be sure and make measurement repeatable & correct. I have to ask?
- You closed all other apps
- Opened xterm
- changed to root and executed powertop
- immidiately minimized xterm and went to desktop and locked it (with switch or double click power, it doesn't matter, but screen has to be blank)
- Left it on stable place (so that accel doesn't make any noise to measurements)
- after 1 minute opened it and took logs to pastebin?
----

Maemos own wiki gives pretty good measurement for pretty low activity state:
http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Software_...ement#Powertop
I bet that on those measurements there was no apps running.

So i repeated powertop on my own N900 and to my amazement total wakeups (last lines in powertop) were around 1000-800 in idle state. Rebooted my device and let it settle for 3-4 minutes so that everything is up and running. Made couple of runs of powertop and now i´m starting to get ~400 wakeups and most of time in C4 cpu state, which is pretty good and looks like my system is currently working as it should.

My setup currently
-2g connected
-no wlan connected or wlan search on
-no mail checkup
-no IM running in background (from your powertop log it looks like you have skype running?)
-No modified kernel(you have it, at least it looks like it?)
-Calendar widget, 2 desktops
-no bluetooth
-no gps

Next i´m going to turn stuff on and see what happens. On your system there is quite a much irq activity going on. I would recommend to reboot and do as i did and measure again. I´m sorry but this is only way to really learn your system. If this feel uncomfortable and stupid please just stop and use what ever feels best for you :P

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Yes, exactly that way (powertop modus operandi).
Skype running? mmm, it could be, did I forget of unable it? mmm,
Kernel modified? Yes, and charged with the ideal conf. (850-500 MHz if I'm not wrong). Based on related posts, battery shouldn't notice this overclocking (but who knows).

So, I'm looking forward to see your results after you enable similar apps. Meanwhile, I'll do more tests ... but indeed, I'll rather re-flash the device and do the tests, and then install the apps and compare. But I need to be sure that with a flashed device my times are as the ones that are said here.

BTW, I'm not feeling unconfortable. I appreciate very much people giving their time trying to help me. I guess my first posts were coming from a frustration state, that I think I wouldn't have if meego hadn't appeared, and in consequence we would be in PR1.3 version.

I think that the first confussion I did is to think that these forums are from nokia people. Since these aren't, you obsiously don't have any need to hear so many complaints.

Having said that, let's see if I can reproduce the battery times that some of you seem to enjoy :)

PD: isn't any script that can predicts the time of battery based on the consume during the last minute? As it does my netbook, If I activate the wifi and increase the brightness of the display, I can see how the expected battery time decreases in the prediction.
Does something similar exist in linux?

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

As for cpu use, petrelli's powertop figures look fine. I'd also be concerned about skype though, especially if you're using 3g or wifi without maximum powersaving.

The way 3g works causes a single packet of data to keep the radio active for many seconds. (operator dependent)


Also one issue I used to have was with the "Automatically switch to wifi when available" option, or something like that. It would sometimes cause wifi to eat huge amounts of power when outside wifi range and using 2g/3g..
if wlan0/wmaster0 appears in '/sbin/ifconfig' output when on 2g/3g, I'd try do 'ifconfig wlan0 down' to cut off wifi.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

I removed my skype account pretty quickly after I found out how much it and msn drains battery, jabber uses probably a tenth of the powers those two require. even a standard sip uses a lot less battery...

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

depends on the sip provider. Mine sends keepalives every 10 secs, so that'd kill battery on 3g pretty damn fast

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Fast additional info, with yesterday reboot, kernel ideal loaded: 2 powertops (2 measures) at least

- wifi, internet, gtalk and skype disabled -> 400, 589 wakeups

- internet (3G) enabled -> 1068, 807, 52000 (I saw an update alert, ignored), 1004, 553, 463, 892, 719 wakeups

Let's see what I have in settings
+ connect automatically -> any connection -> 10 minutes (interval)
. Is this active even when the device is already connected?
+ exchange -> every 30 min during 8->16:00, perhaps too much, but one connection each 30 min is not so dramatic, isn't it? I change to every 4h.
+ GPS, enabled. Umm, I though it was disabled. Now I remember that I re-enabled it when I saw the the iphone didn't need to turn it off to have decent battery. However, I see the GPS working only when any map app is active, is it true? In any case, I disable it.

-> 567, 490, 482, 863, 497 wakeups

- gtalks and skype ONLINE -> 1461, 3398, 839, 603, 999, 796, 1353 wakeups

Notes: At the beginning, I disabled gtalk and skype, some days ago I started to just putting the IM in OFFLINE rather than disable the accounts. I understand that the effect is the same, but perhaps there are some differences (?)

Well, I don't know if these values agree with the poor battery time. I will re-flash the device and see what happens then. But I will install some apps because I need them for next days, so I'll be unable to do "clean" tests ...

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

gps is only using power if an app or widget is using it

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

Just reflashed, installed these apps

- enable extras, extras-testing, extras-devel
faster application

- disable extras-testing, extras-devel, enable firefox
ansel-A
batteryGraph
bluethoot-dun
firefox
opera
fm boost
fm radio
hermes
mobile hotspot
pidgin
roadrunner
pygtkeditor
time workshop
tunewiki (ovi)
vnc viewer
wifieye
connectNow internet connection switch
desktop command execution widget
openssh client and server
google voice plugin
pidgin protocols protocols
pidgin extra protocols
recorder
cuteexplorer
subtitles support
extra decoders support
fmms
wifi switcher
ogg support
maemo-geolocation
adflasjblock-css
simple brightness applet
extra decoders support
bluethoot dial-up
3g/2g dual mode selection
maemo-geolocation
merge your duplicate contacts
rootsh
marina theme
humanity theme
angry birds

a) question, has a theme a high impact in the battery consume? Before I had the humanity theme activated.


Well, let's see how is battery consumption now. Widgets in the 2 desktops, battery, ip, and calendar, All of them not automatically being updated, with the exception of calendar, but only 3 times per day. Brightness to 1, marine theme activated, static (downloaded) images as background, 3G always connected, wifi disabled, GTALK enabled (skype disabled), GPS disabled.

11:59 -> 54%
I switch off, I switch on, and then
12:02 -> 34%
12:22 -> 36% ... ok, batterygraph says the same, so I'll better wait to have full battery again.

I post it anyway

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

i'm getting on average an estimate of about 4 out of the charger before the battery indicator gets low enough for me to worry, this with almost desktop level usage, wifi on all the time, skype too

I havn't allowed it to shutdown from lack of charge nor iddle for too long unplugged.

I probably have a few things running in the background that shouldn't, i've been installing lots of stuff......

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

13:18 57%
14:42 53%
(0.05% / min)

surf 2min, pidgin 2min (quit, not just close), fam 5min
14:56 -> 50%
(0.21% / min)

15:26 -> 47%
(0.10% / min)

<5 min surfing
15:59 ->41%
(0.26% / min)

16:20 -> 37%
(0.19% / min)

16:49 -> 34%
(0.10% / min)

It could appear than battery is somewhat better now, while it is like the whole so was faster as well.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

would there be a way to limit the power of the amplifiers of the receivers even if that make the signal worse?

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

I think that may be a bit of an oxy*****, as if you lower the power and the reception is worse it has to try harder to stay connected so likely uses just as much if not more power in the long run.

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

I'm guessing demodulating and decoding signal uses more anyway. When wcdma was announced, the designers "bragged" that it was so adsvanced/complex, only the fastest personal computers (of the time) had enough cpu to decode it.

The command channel is probably easier to decode since the phone uses almost no power in standby.

I noticed the low signal power consumption myself too. I was out at sea some 30 minutes by speedboat out, and the signal was very weak. With the mugen battery I get over a day with xchat/irc and such open. That day I got less than 8 hours..

Re: Its not Wifi, but GPRS that is consuming most of the battery
 

the idea is to limit how hard the device will try to boost the signal when it's weak, not just make the signal itself weaker