Tips for a longer charge?
 

Does anyone have tips for a longer charge?

Right now, I am simply locking the screen and keyboard using the lock slider. I know that the screen powers off and where it is locked, it shouldn't accidentally come back on while in the Nokia case in my bag.

Should I also turn off bluetooth and the wireless connection?
Should I set my Chat status to off?

Without doing this I have had mixed results. Once in a while, my charge will last a couple of days. Most of the time, it is drained of all charge 12 hours later.

Edit:

- If you have connections set to automatically connect and those connections are not available, it can drain your battery. If you know you will be leaving your access point's range, shut off your wifi so it wont keep searching.

- You should lock or put your tablet to sleep when not in use.

- If you use your phone's internet through tethering, shut it off when you are done. I assume when other devices are unpaired, the BT is still active on the 810.

- If you use the RSS reader, you may want to turn off automatic updates as it may poll for new updates even when you aren't connected to something with internet connectivity.

= If you use a media player that searches your storage for new media, make sure the app points to only the directories you plan for media to be placed. This way it doesn't scan through lots of folders and files it doesn't need to Or disable the metacrawl entirely.

= Disable any applets you don't use or need.

- Turn down the brightness to the lowest you are comfortable with.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

It seems like the quick drain might be a consequence of leaving your N810 in an area where it is constantly trying to search/connect to an access point. Try putting it in offline mode while you aren't using wifi.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

Would it help to set the "Connect automatically" in the general tab of the Connectivity settings to Always as or to always disconnect?

I've found my battery will drain when I put it into offline mode as well, though I am not sure if it still will since I have updated the OS to the current point release.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I haven't extensively tested the idea yet, but once and a while I'll leave my N810 somewhere where there are a few networks that it might constantly be searching for, when I come back a few hours later and pull the N810 out of the case, the battery is completely dead and it shut itself off.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

There seems to be a bug in OS2008 - or some of the applications bundled with it, or Modest - which (obviously) I haven't nailed down yet; so it's not reported.

The root cause is that the "Select connection" dialogue doesn't time out, so once it pops up it sets there constantly scanning for wireless APs.

Now, I think it's either the RSS applet or Modest which when set to update themselves when connected to wifi do something silly, or misuse the API, and trigger that dialogue to appear. Bingo: one flat battery.

Going into and out-of offline mode seems to cure it, but is a real pain: I don't have wifi at the office anymore, but don't want to remember to switch it back to normal mode when I get home so that the RSS feeds are up-to-date in the morning.

Any help in narrowing down this bug so that a specific bug can be logged in Bugzilla would be welcome.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

Nooohhh... :rolleyes:

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I've been experimenting with my N800 to see how to get more battery life.

Heavy surfing on WiFI....it lasts about 4 hours on a charge.

Putting it in OFFLINE mode and locking the screen....battery seems to die in about 6 hours.

A question had previously been rasied in another thread if the amount of memory added had something to do with it.

My batteries started "tanking" after I added two Patriot 8 GB Class 6 SDHC cards. Maybe the memory cards have something to do with it?

I've also started watching the CPU indicator to see if there is some background task that is cycling--I found that the RSS reader application was chewing up cycles even when set to OFFLINE when I had it on 30 minute automatic update. Now I have it set for MANUAL UPDATE and I haven't noticed the CPU usage bar indicator being pegged as much.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

2 things that help:

Offline mode. As pointed out, the connection box will come up, and scan, and scan, and scan, and scan, and .... This seems to happen only when it sees an access point; I had mine set on five minute update, and watched it on an hour-long drive. Whenever the box came up, there was some wifi connection I had just driven by. Also, for over a half hour, in a rather rural area (I know of 5 APs in that half-hour stretch), it didn't come up. But in any case, if it sees a connection, and doesn't hold its current connection, it will drain your battery. (It may, in some cases, come up with no wifi anywhere close; but I haven't observed that characteristic. I use modest, but not the RSS reader.) So, offline mode.

Letting the media-scouring daemon (metalayer-crawler) loose on lots of data. Those 2 SDHC cards, do they have stuff on them? If so, is metalayer permitted to crawl them? If so, it is eating your battery... Disable it, or restrict it to the portions of your device where media might actually show up.

And one thing that might help with your online/offline mode troubles. Run a poor-man's cron (looping script that checks the time) and have it switch to online at 18:00, or something. If you want further help on this idea, I'd be glad to help out, but it probably doesn't belong in this thread. We could start a new thread for that, with the aim of coming up with a wiki page...

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

Would anyone like to come up with a small applet to activate offline mode, then put the device into lock screen and keyboard?

That seems to work for me, though my N800 is usually plugged back into the charger at the end of every day, regardless of the remaining charge

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

Hey guys, I actually posted a thread on this very topic not knowing about this one! This tip is probably obvious but, turning down the screen brightness to the lowest setting helps a lot. Also, I disabled all the applets on my desktop and it added about 3 hours of battery life.

Thanks for all the good info! Keep it coming! :D

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I should think that turning off the RSS reader alone would save a lot of battery life and improve performance. I'm only using Clock, Speed Contacts and Internet search and I'm not sure how much power that would suck up

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

can some give me detailed instructions on how to restrict metalayer crawler only to certain media folders. and also instruction on how to totally disable it if i choose. i use canola 2 for all my media most of the time... if that makes a difference.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I've noticed that if my N800 resets itself I automatically lose half the charge on the battery. For example this morning I had a full charge and was playing a few podcasts on the way to work (approximately 1:15 commute). At about 45 mins in media player choked on an MP3 and when the n800 restarted that battery indicator was showing battery low.
I tuned it on a few minutes ago and found I now have four hours left active. No other applets or applications were running and the n800 was set to offline mode.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

There is a video on the Canola2 site that shows someone picking media directories. I would say that if you make a folder on your card that is for audio, one for video, one for pics, that you can then specify only those directories per each type of media. If you leave everything loose in one directory, including other files, then Canola is always crawling through everything.

In Canola, when telling it where to look for video, you have the ability to do two things: drill open (or closed) directories, and to mark them for crawling. So drill away, but only mark the folders for content that you need to.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I followed the tips I outlined at the top (so far) and I am happy to report that my N810 has almost a full charge 18 hours later after I only locked it and put it in the sleeve. I didn't put it to sleep, but I did shut down chat and wireless and set my RSS feeds to manual updates. I also set my mail app (default one) to manual update too (where I have to click on refresh button). This all works out fine for me, because when I want to do these things on my N810, I am tethering to my blackberry 8800 (T-Mobile) anyway. When I am at my desktop during the day, chat and email are readily available and easier on my desktop.

The one thing that had been bugging me about my 810 was having enough of a charge when I grab it and go without leaving it plugged in all of the time.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I think having something from the left menu to bring up the dialog that hitting the power button does would be cool. And this way it wouldn't have to be an applet that was sucking up my precious processing power. :)

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I've raised https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2857 to deal with this. More information on that report would be good, since it's a bug which takes so long to reproduce.

Re: Tips for a longer charge?
 

I found that modest was killing my battery overnight, from a full charge. Not sure if it was the direct culprit, but the battery lasts a lot longer now that I've removed modest. I tried disabling the metalayer crawler before removing modest, but that didn't work, and I've since re-enabled the crawler

I leave bluetooth on, but hidden, and have my wifi set to not connect automatically. Unless I'm going for a long walk with maemo mapper, or using the media player heavily, I get 2-3 days of light usage.