Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I'm in the middle of running battery tests. Doing a total baseline right now..
- fully charged from charger, remove from charger
- take out SIM
- reboot n900, turn on, run NO apps except for xterminal and switch to offline mode. Turn the screen on every 4-5 hours just to check battery percentage

Basically the phone is sitting there doing nothing. After exactly 24hours, i'm down to 67% battery free. I run

lshal | grep percen

to see the battery percentage.

You might want to try the same thing for 24hrs just to see if you can get to 67% free after 24hours

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

yeah... down to 67% in 24 hours in offline mode... that shouldn't be.

At first I thought the N900 used basically no power in offline mode, but taking a closer look, it seems that it does...

For me from 97% full at 05:18 to 84%full at 11:58 in offline mode (while I'm asleep) it uses 13% in less than 7 hours.
I've since 11:58 been connected to wifi and skype/gtalk/msn (cellular off) and am down to 81% full at 13:39.

It seems to me that there is definitely an issue with constant slow draining of the battery, unrelated to being connected or not, and then of course usage adds to the draining...

The standby battery in offline mode should be much better than it is

***EDIT*** my battery life is still acceptable. I'm still trying to pinpoint the cause of a drain bug that seldom gets triggered, and drains my battery within 10 hours or so. But most of the time I get decent usage. about 15-18 hours always connected, listening to 5-6 hours of music, 30-45 minutes of phone calls, some internet/messaging(maybe 1-2 hours) and all of this usually while connected to wifi internet, and sometimes to 2G..
2G phone is almost always on except when I'm in areas with very poor reception, I just switch the cellular radio off and only use wifi.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

open the terminal application just touch it with your finger...
now you're in terminal with a command prompt, where you can enter lots of commands.
As long as you don't enter any commands under root(don't worry you have to know how to get root access to get it) feel free to try some commands. the" lshal | grep percen" will display the percentage of battery left. that's LshaL not ishal or ishai.
then there's lshal |grep battery which will display lots of info about the battery including the percentage left.

I usually keep a terminal window always open and use the following command: "lshal | grep percen;date" the ";" allows you to concatenate two commands. It will run them one after the other, so you get a percentage of the batter and the date/time. Keeping the terminal open I run that command throughout the day, and it gives me a battery usage profile.

Would anyone with more linux experience suggest a way to from the command line just enter that command "lshal | grep percen;date" plus maybe a way to enter a sentence explaining what the usage was, and having the output of everything logged to a file?
is there a command that just regurgitates text?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

FYI, for a relative comparison, take the Nokia E71 as an example. (I'm running a N900 vs E71 battery test)

I have it running on 2G, NO wifi whatsoever.
- always connected to 2G internet running skype+gtalk (via Fring 32 hours)
- Nokia email checking 3 mins 8am to midnight
- its been 32 hours and I still have 60% battery left

I'm going to run a very similiar test on 2G with the n900 with Nokia email + 2 accounts in conversations (skype+gtalk). BUT i will NOT turn on the screen unless I get a call or check battery percentage.

I suspect the n900 won't even come close and the large screen will not be the reason. Either the battery is not good enough or the n900 is not optimized at all for battery...

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Well, the E71 is a beast though when it comes to battery life. I would forget to charge it after a few days due to its amazing battery life. But, the N900 has a much bigger screen, faster processor and chipset and smaller battery. All those decrease greatly its battery life. Anyway, I am sort of curious to see what you get.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I should have results in 3 days.. remember I'm not going to turn on the n900 screen(only to check percentage+pickup calls) and the only app running will be Nokia Mail. The screen and processor should not be a factor in my test.

Might also try and somehow fit the n900 battery into the E71 to see if the issue is with the actual battery size.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

If i use the phone, like web/internet radio/etc my battery will last like 3-8 hours. If i don't use it but have wlan enabled with skype it will last days...

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Asssuming the N900 has a "tee" installed (I don't have one yet) you could do this:

(lshal | grep percen; date; echo "my message") | tee -a ~/my_history.txt

This will display everything on the terminal as well as appending it to the file "my_history.txt" in your home directory.

Do a "man tee" and "man echo" for more information.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Yes, N900 has tee, and your command works fine for me.

-jkq

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

I have a suggestion for you guys... I don't know if it's only me, but sometimes when I disconnect my N900 from the charge, it writes on the screen something like ''to save energy, disconnect the charger from the device''. It tells me this when I already disconnected.
I think that sometimes, even though you disconnect from the charge, it still thinks it's connected without receiving any power. What I do is I restart my n900 each time I disconnect it.