Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Sorry, i was talking about mass density, so energy/mass (hence pointing out that lithium is light). Batteries are a lot more similar if you look at volume density.

Anyway, i did leave a lot out for simplicity. I didn't even mention volume, but was really talking about both mass and volume. A more complete statement would have been: lithium-based batteries are the best option, when considering energy/volume and energy/mass, for a small, "safe", rechargeable power source with sufficiently high power density and satisfactorily low self discharge characteristics for a pocket computer.

:)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I seem to have this same issue. One night my N900 was fully charged at 11 pm and battery was dead at 5 am (all radios presumably switched off). Last night the tablet was fully charged at 10 pm and at 8 am the battery indicator had dropped only one step (some browsing and phone call included). Then the Wifi hanged and within 2 hours I had only one step left.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

so what is the word about the batteries, some people have defect units or what?
my phone is dying way to fast and its making me not use the phone that much in fear that it will die on me.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

There's been a number of reasons posted so far. Some people have found that replacing the SIM card fixed the problem, others have replaced the phone and fixed it. Alternately, it could be a software problem - there's been a few people pointed to issues with WLAN and/or bluetooth (though others have had no issues with these).

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I didn't see anyone report that replacing the phone fixed it. On the contrary, what I have read was that replacing the phone did NOT fix it, replacing the SIM card however does in some circumstances.

It sounds like the majority of the time it is software related, which is what you would expect. With the various random combinations of software and configuration, its obviously triggering something.

It could even be as simple as incompatibility with certain routers that you may happen to walk in range of during the day and the N900 happens to be probing at that moment. That would be a good explanation for random WiFi lockups.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

For all those that have been experiencing fast battery drain due to wifi being hung (not being able to find wifi spots after disconnection, until reboot of the device), there is an open bug report at:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6416

Please leave your comment there, and vote for the issue. You have to register, but it's real fast. More people report this issue, better are the chances of getting it fixed.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

For those that have the wifi hang, I'm guessing you cannot just disable the wifi and enable it again as a fix? I wonder if the terminal command of it would be a bandaid fix for now

ifconfig - tells you what wireless and wired hardware you have on the device (for the n900 it'll only be wireless)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ifconfig

That command will tell you the hardware, MAC address, what IP you are connected to, DNS, etc..

Then for whatever one is the wifi hardware you can do

ifconfig NAMEOFTHEHARDWARE (e.g. wlan0 for PCs usually) down

then

ifconfig NAMEOFTHEHARDWARE (e.g. wlan0 for PCs usually) up

(that is if I remember the commands correctly).

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Disabling the wifi and enabling it again won't show existing wifi hotspots, that's part of the problem.

I knew about the ifconfig command, but didn't know about the up/down command. I'll try using those next time I get this issue. Thanks!

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I had the same problem with battery drain, here's what I found out, and did.

when configuring my e-mail accounts I used N900 factory pre-determined settings for bellsouth.net thats the automatic recommended easy way, right?, everything went fine for awhile, then I stopped getting my mail, did everything again, received all my mail and after half a day it just stopped again, re-booted and received mail.

Meanwhile my battery was draining like grazy 4-6 hours max. Last night I re-configured my e-mail with the "other" setting and filled all the info i.e. pop and smtp etc. , update every hour etc. manually.... recharged the phone for about 3 hours and left it on the table overnight unplugged. This morning the battery was still full, I had skype and rest of the applets (om weather, foreca and stuff) on, no facebook widget.

Seems like the factory e-mail settings in N900 weren't quite right so my unit was trying to connect to server all the time (even when update was on manual) thus draining the battery.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I was so sure that the battery drain problem was wifi related. But now it happened again and wifi was definitely not the cause. Seems that I have (again) encountered pure crap made by Nokia. I think I'll just return the unit and claim my money back (since I have that option). Regarding my record with Nokia warranty services I am not going to wait for a month to get the unit "repaired".