Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My phone usage : ~2h listening music (all around 192kbps VBR 75% volume) with web browsing (edge, 3G) with enabled ICQ account.
~10min calls , 5 to 10 sms, then around 6hours on wifi , checking e-mails , downloading images ,working in terminal ower ssh (replacement for netbook :) ) .., unplugged from charger at 8 mourning , went back to home at 22 o'clock with 6% of battery

I thik this is not bad - but for sure I purchase Energizer XP4000 .
It fit exactly in my back pocket and with modified cable from telephone (twisted soft cable from phone to earphone) i can use phone without limitation (little worse handling, yes)
Price is same as two original BL-5J batteryes.
It's abble to make two full charges from empty battery (I think charging non empty battery at time of hard usage will extend this because of charging effectivity)

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

How the hell do you get such usage!? I am bummed. All that I do is take my phone off charger, make few calls/sms and I need to recharge by evening!

Any tricks/tips buddy?

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Same problem here.

Without being connected to wifi/3g and having no apps/widgets installed that use Internet connections I can't last a day.
I send/receive a max of 10 sms's a day and/or 1-3 short phone calls

I have 2 original batteries and I have this problem with both batteries.

Any tip is indeed very welcome

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

My phone cant break a day without charging too , bud this fifteen hours are enought for me (with xp4000 no problem at all :) )

I don't know how to help :)
Only switch of wireless lan scanning , firmware updated right after unpack to PR1.1 .. you might download powertop from this site and check if CPU is underclocked automaticly or if some aplication not wakeing up too much,
with all switched of (only cell phone on) cpu run at 250Mhz and in C4 state

with three pages (no flashplayer video) playng mp3s , wifi, icq on
15% at 500Mhz 85% at 250MHz 60% C3 40% C4 state
applets with using net - RSS (~10 channels) default weather

most time spend on edge connection,brithnes at 3bars ,at night at one
mail updates are for 30 minutes only if wifi connection , rss feeds updates manual ,weather update 6hours

duno what else ...

Only first time i loaded it with mp3's , movies and images there was some time unusable becasuse of indexing (around 4000mp3 ) , which take half of battery ...

Who's been eating my battery?
 

Ok.

I've now been using the N900 for two months without any problems with the battery. Did some testing this past week to see how long I could keep the thing going when connected over wifi (2 days) and also when skype was running in the background (1 day).

Today after unplugging the device I noticed it was eating the battery too fast. Checked top, and saw pulseaudio using 2% of the cpu all the time (i had played a few videos and aac files before going to bed and plugging the charger in).

Well, a reboot fixed the pulseaudio problem (if i tried to kill the process, it would just start up again and eat more cpu). But now I have an even bigger problem. It seems there are a few other processes that just won't calm down, and keep waking the cpu up. At the moment the top of my top printout looks like this (all the time):

(ignore Xorg, top and osso-xterm, since those should be using the cpu)

Also powertop says that the total amount of wakeups is around 5000.

Could someone who doesn't have any problems with their battery check these: What is the "average" amount of wakeups with powertop when you leave the display on (no network connection, no programs in the background etc.) and also observe your top for maybe 10-20 seconds and tell are there any processes that are constantly taking up cpu time. I know I'm being a little paranoid about the background processes, but if my battery goes down from 48-72 hours to 12 hours, something is keeping the device up all the time.

Thank you for any hints or help.

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Total wakeups 1760, 58.7s | IRQ 1231, 41.0/s | Timers 529, 17.6/s
HW wakeups 2, 0.1/s | Real gp_timers expired 189, 6.3/s

... But I have 3G connected.


Compare with your output - you have "/usr/sbin/ohmd" running which means - a couple of programs start (ohmd is a "policy daemon" which checks application access to HW resources).
And bme_RX-51 is a Battery Management process - I think it is a consequence of battery drain.

More interesting is a combination of "mce", "camera-ui" and "gnome-vfs-daemon". gnome-vfs-daemon controls volume mount/unmount, including mSD card. MCE is a daemon which controls different buttons etc ... including magnetic switch on back cover. So - do you use mSD? Do you had chance to put in in some magnetic field? Do you expose a front side to flickering light?

Actually all that stuff may be because battery provides unstable power, for exam - due to high power consumer.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Additionally, I need to admit what I may also have been exposed to high battery drain. But so far I blamed it on not properly switching video circuitry (SGX) off. Or even HAM (Hildon Application Manager) which has a habit running once at the same time of day and battery going down that time. I have plan to change that time to midnight then my phone is on charger and see.

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

Wow. That is a huge difference.

I kept staring at the top results a little longer. Seems that at the moment I cut&pasted the previous list, there were a few processes that aren't usually active, camera and vfs-daemon being a few of these. The ones that are constantly active are mce, ohmd and hildon-desktop. The others pop up every now and then (10 sec interval or so). Also /sbin/init keeps jumping to the top list quite frequently, is this normal? Camera-ui appears to be activated for a second when you slide open the keyboard.

But no, no mSD, no flickering lights. I'm not quite sure what you mean about the magnetic field, though.

But basically all I did was reboot the device before this started. It had been on for 9 days, during which I don't recall installing anything special except for Shortcutd (which I had already uninstalled). I guess there is always the option of reflashing, but that doesn't really solve the mystery :)

Here is a link to my powertop readings when the device is unlocked.

edit: It seems powertop is a little inconsistent. Just noticed that there are over 200 hw wakeups in the above list. Did another test earlier, which only had 5 HW wakeups (about the same amount of total wakeups, though).

Re: Who's been eating my battery?
 

hildon-desktop - because you use X-Term and output to it. Also, some another screen stuff.
mce - it controls any user activity. For exam - you tap in screen to keep device unlocked, that means mce work. You move device - accelerometer works --> mce works.

Both are OK, you can read about it in
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...ystem_Software

BTW, I suggest you to make a measurement in this way - start powertop, immediately bring desktop theme (put X-Term into background), close KBD and lock device via slide button and put on table - all in 10secs. After 1min unlock and see. You should have little better values, at least mce/hildon-desktop may gone away.

ohmd is another beast. It is a daemon which control access of applications to hardware resource. It has some Nokia-written policy in files. For exam, it may allow or disallow access to audio for some application and people had in past some troubles with non-system media player. It is closed source. But in my mind it runs only if somebody tries to get access to some resource intensively. Usually it happens during application start.

No. That points to intensive daemon processes terminations. If you can repeat it, it has sense to install sysklogd package and look into /var/log/syslog after you repeat it (and run 'dmesg' too). In past (PR1.0) I saw the terminations of some video processing software like tracker component gst-video-thumbnailerd because existence of some unplayable video files. In PR1.1 it just locks system media player from playing video.

N900 back cover has a small magnet and N900 body has a magnet switch. If you don't close a back cover, your mSD would not be mounted. That stuff is read by mce and transfered to execute mSD mount even you have no mSD. Just guess - intensive magnetic field or mechanical jitter (magnetic switch is mechanical, I guess) would cause a flood of signals to mce.

Hm-m, it points to tracker again! It starts looking files in file space after reboot (some timeout does exists, of course).

I see many "sleep" processes. It points to some shell work - some shell scripts are executed many times. It again supports a theory that you experiences the many process starts.

Re: N900 battery life questions, issues, scenarios
 

Don't know if this applies to anyone. If so, please report it here or in the bug report.

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8848

If I reboot my device before leaving home I can last all day long with lots of activity. I can connect to WiFi at work and it causes no problem. But, for some reason, connecting and disconnecting from my home's WiFi eats up my battery. :confused: