What is your battery life?
 

I'm currently running a perl script on each battery cycle with different things on and off to try and see what uses the most battery and how I could increase my current 7 hour battery life, which is too little for me.

The point of this thread is to see how many get more than 7 hours out of their device. You don't have to specify what you are running, but if you get more than 7 hours of REAL usage it would be nice if you mentioned wheter you are constantly connected via WiFi/3G, are using IM accounts etc.

My current findings after 3 days are that anything that uses internet drains battery fast. IE all of the IM services, having Irssi / Xchat open in the background, using ANY widget that updates itself often, having email on autoretrieve. Having any of these functions in use lowers my batterylife down to 7 hours. Currently I'm testing each IM account and each setting to confirm this, but currently these are my findings.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I have never run the thing below half full (which lasts me a good 15 hours) so I have no idea how long it would go for to a complete discharge. And apart from when I am in a dodgy 3g area, I am always connected to something. My experience is that camera/video recording burn battery.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

i got the same findings.

if you mean by REAL usage internetting, gaming, calling im'ing etc i doubt alot of people would be telling the truth if they did (get more than 7 hours out of it.)

gaming/3g/wifi/camera/gps all big drainers.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

hsdpa/mobilinternetonline/wifionline/gps/location/autoemail_in_every_1_hour/skypeonline/calling/chatting/browsing

6hours. I have to recharge it twice a day. This is the painful through about maemo 5.

My WinMO device with the same condition - 1 day.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I get about 7-9 hours with WIFI and 3G always on. Mail sync. every 15 minutes. Moderate web use and thinkering to get to know the device. I have no widgets actice that I know of....

Re: What is your battery life?
 

guys sorry to bump in. but anyone how do I retreive an IMEI number on N900 when the phone is off?? Is it on the box?

Re: What is your battery life?
 

could you define real life usage?

because i think you mean using it intensively.

but real life usage could also mean a day in the real life of .. the voter.. which in the first case i get 6-8, second case its 15 or more

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Real life usage= when you use your N900 with its all capabilities on, not off

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I get only 4 hours of hard using web, if it's moderate I get 6-8 hours.
The best case is to just get another battery, this is what i did. Now I don't think about how much i'm using my phone!

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Real life usage means what it says. How much battery usage you get from using the device the way you use it. I did NOT want people answering the poll with measured battery life (you can get the battery consumption information from the phone), but with what they experience when using the phone. No one uses it 100% of the time in idle or 100% of the time in use.

Everyone can use the phone with all functions on, that will give you around 4-5 hours of battery life. I'm more interested in regular usage scenarios. IE With the features turned on the way you now have them, what is your battery life?

Re: What is your battery life?
 

For me, as a (power) user/developer with a decent understanding of what things on the device use how much power, I seem to get between 6-8 hours of heavy usage.

Higher than some because of tweaks rooted in knowledge of how the device uses power (lower backlight, push email, always 3g or always 2g depending on location/situation rather than dual mode)

Lower than some due to high usage and games.

I agree that Constant/Persistant data transfer (no matter how small) are the bane of the devices power source.

The device seems quite good about going into idle/low power states when possible (aside from the potential wifi bug discussed elsewhere on this forum)

But if you have things constantly transferring data, your power efficiency will suck. 3G, and the power saving behavior of the WiFi radio on the device are oriented towards burst traffic with periods of inactivity between (web browsing), not slow steady streams of data.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Yes, this is supported by my current findings with my battery drain tests. I wonder if it's possible to fine-tune the IM plugins to NOT check who is online constantly, but say every five minutes or so? Or does that go against the APIs from Skype/MSN/Google? It seems unnessesary for the IM accounts to constantly exchange information from the servers.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

in that real life usage case i get sometimes 8 hrs and sometimes more than 15. i dont cut low on the most important things as internet and phone, sms and im (3g).
i wait with wifi till the drain-bug is fixed and this way i am satisfied its not great but satisfied. when im at home i charge it whether its half full or empty and when im out i sometimes have to think about my use in order to maintain being reachable. but thats usually due to lack of charging. getting a 2nd battery i will never. if i notice i cant cut it with the one battery i think im gonna get an other phone. that'd be ridiculous. its balancing on the edge but im sure it has to improve one way or the other in the future by software etc.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Getting about ~11 hours usage.
Charge overnight: wake up at 7:30am
browse for 15 min in bed.
MS Exchange Push kicks off from 8am until 9pm (push times, other times manual). Receive about 50 emails /day
I also have a GMAIL imap connection open all day. receive about 30 emails/day.
Spend maybe 20 minutes a day on voice calls. Send/receive about 25 texts. Additional ~1h of browsing. Play DrNokSnes for ~15 min.
by around 6pm the battery is nearly cooked in the red zone.

I have a feeling the MS Exchange and imap connections drain the battery. I get about the same results on both 3G only and 3G/Wifi

Re: What is your battery life?
 

After installing openssh I think my battery life decreased. I wonder if there's something it's doing (it's running as a a server) that's draining it faster..

Re: What is your battery life?
 

About 24 hours with regular usage:
1 hour ecoach activity
6-8 hours browser activity
8-10 msm out-in
2 phone out call
10 mins of video record
some photos
and some contacts editing

Re: What is your battery life?
 

You can (as root) do:

to stop the sshd and see if that helps with battery life at all.
Note, if you reboot the phone sshd will automatically be enabled.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Not sure about skype, but on MSN, AIM (and I'm pretty sure Jabber/gTalk status updates are pushed by the server, not pulled by the client at intervals.

If a protocol has an option to suppress these messages that might potentially reduce power usage.

Unfortunately Skype is a completely closed box, protected by obfuscation layers and legal threats. You're 100% at the mercy of Skype and it's handlers for any improvement there.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I've successfully used the device on SIM most of the time and wi-fi whenever available, down to half charge after 2.5 days. However, I press off-line mode before going to bed.

I've turned off GPS and location services and vibration.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

lowering WiFi from 100mw to 10mw gave me an additional 3-5 hours usage. Nothing else was done. Mail every 15 min x 2 accounts. MfE constant - between 8 and 22.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

i have my phone on charge now and the charging light is on but whenever i take the charger out it immediately says low battery. any one know why this might be and is it a known bug that i can resolve?

thanks

Re: What is your battery life?
 

try reflashing it

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Too many variables for a poll like this one.

With 3G and GPS on, and browsing Flash sites, two hours of MP3's and playing 30 minutes of video, I am lucky to get five hours.

3G & GPS off, browsing less Flash content, two hours of MP3. and 30 minutes of video playing I get nine hours.

Both situations are with "constant" use. The numbers would probably go up about two hours for each if more sporadic use.


The battery is not big enough for the features the N900 has- if you want to use them much and not near a power socket.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I got every day about 10 to 12 hours, all on, wifi on 10, normal use, videos over upnp, music, chat, some phonecalls, backlight full (brilliant display, so i want to have all of it). But still not enough. My old N73 had about 3 to 5 days, also 3G, video streaming, and so on ...
I will try a standby test with all off, no activities, no phonecalls, ... just to get the real standbytime.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I haven't really established normal use yet so can't really say...

Sometimes it's 1-4 sometimes 20+. I just keep fiddling with things :)

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I am getting about 8hrs, thats with 3G & bluetooth on. With a normal amount of use. If I turn the 3G off and use only the edge and wifi for internet, making sure to disconnect after use and and with the brightness down one block. I am on day 2 1/2 right now with about 1/8 of the battery left. Thats with about 1 hour of 3g and 1 hour of wifi (making sure to change back to gsm after use), 1 hour max of mp3's, and maybe 20-30 mins of phone use. I have no active widgets.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I did a trial run a couple of days ago.

Set wifi to auto-search and auto-login (where I work I have 2 weak APs, the phone jumps up and down, I also walk between them a lot), left a few conversations open (Google chat), set my availability. Set bluetooth to on (visible), charged it at about 2 AM and took it to bed (wakes me up in the morning, stop looking at me like that).

09:00- 100%
11:00- coffee done, by now I had almost an hour of playing, showing off the device and playing video. Also, I tested the FM transmitter in the car, about 10 minutes of playback. 100%
12:00- A few calls, loads of chatting (Google Talk), some SMSs. Dropped to 80%
14:00- Wifi is taking its toll, Youtube showoff really eats. 60%. I started to worry a little, thinking it would be beeping off when I got home, so no more youtube. Continued chatting and wifi activity, a few snaps with the cam.
18:00- Battery down to 30-40%. No wifi at home, it was searching and trying unavailable networks. Some gaming.
20:00- Battery down to 20%
02:00- Still 20%

Couldn't get it to go into red, gave up and charged it. That's it for me, all day long with internet linked, browsing, playing, calling. If something really heavy comes up, I'll find a place to charge.

Because I don't use the device overnight (event tho it has BT and wifi scanning), I voted for 13-16 hrs, but really, it's all day.

IMO, all-day-networking Nokia target has be achieved.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Alas I have very poor success with the battery.
I am on AT&T so 3G is out of question anyways. Additionally, i have also disabled bluetooth, wifi and GPS.
The brightness has been set to 3 out of 5.

I dont make too many calls. But after an hour of websurfing/ radio streaming the battery was down to half. Can that be normal?

Re: What is your battery life?
 

13-16 hours.

taken off charge at 9:00am
moderate playing with throughout the day
default desktop, no extra widgets added other than weather and data logger
connected to the work wifi from 9:30am to 5:30pm
only 2G available
no phonecalls
two or three texts sent

battery is roughly 85% depleted by midnight.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

just got new one n900 from service...:D battery life is i used it two days and it still shows half a battery:D

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Well, Well Well.... i got 17hrs yesterday. I turned off Data,wifi BT on the phone was on but my BT ear piece was turned off. 3g was on ALL day. The day started for me around 6am. Every now and then i turned on data to get email and did a little surfing. Around noon i still have over 70% of battery life left. Around 6pm i used it heavily chatting and talking on the phone. Around 11pm battery was still around 43% remaining. Today i will leave BT ear piece on do different things to see what will happen with battery life.

PS so far since 6am when i took it off the charger. Xterm using lshal reports as follows:

6:00am: battery.reporting 1190 mAh - 94%
8:21am: battery.reporting 1003 mAh - 79% --at this point i turned on Data...hopefully it should turn its self off
8:44am: battery.reporting 981 mAh - 77%

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Sticker in the back under battery I believe

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I have 4 IM Accounts running and SIP all the time.
5 Emails accounts: 3 IMAP, 2 POP3
Weather Gadget Loaded and updating every hour over WLAN
Data plan monitor running.
Calendar Widget running.
Load Applet on too.
Run a fair amount of this forum on 3G (or 2/2.5G when signal reduces) to about a couple of hours a day.
About an hour or so of voice calls over 3G
Around 7 hours of connection to WiFi in the office (power dropped which helped)
Around 60 odd texts each way each day and lots of email activity too.

Phew - Well that's all I can think of but I get around 9-10 hours a day.

I have found that when I am in a marginal area where switching between 3.5/3/2.5/2G that the battery goes into a dive.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

that would be my next test sometime next week

Re: What is your battery life?
 

are higher capacity batteries a possibility as an optional extra?

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Nothing official out yet but there are external power sources that plug into the MicroUSB socket to effectively power the phone.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

i believe mugen is working on a battery.

I think the thing that drains battery the most is searching for a cellular connection. put the N900 into offline mode as the metro went underground and battery didn't decrease as much over that 45 min period. Otherwise the tablet would just be getting a connection each time it entered a station and losing it 3 min later as the subway went back into the tunnel.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Most cell devices (phones et al) will increase their power rating in an attempt to contact a tower when their signal goes. I am not aware of any device that has the common sense to realise after a frantic search that nothing is talking to it and tone the requests down a touch. end result - put a switched on mobile in your pocket when entering a decent elevator and you'll microwave everyone by the tenth floor! :)

hope that makes enough sense to explain your experience. This is also a similar effect when switching modes but no where in the same league.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

I am a heavy skype user and tend to get a fair number of messages. I always leave WiFi and 3G on and browse the internet from 1 - 3 hours a day. I have e-mail set to poll every half hour and last weekend I had vnc viewer running most of the time.

I have never had a case where I "needed" to charge during the day. The only time I have done so is when I wanted to test the legacy charger converter.

Sorry to be boring, but I have no problems to report.

Re: What is your battery life?
 

Well 13-16 for me though I think that's not as accurate as it could be.

Basically this is the trend for me for the last two days:
2.5G, 1 jabber connection(this also sends me mail notification through the Jabber Mail Component, and links me through to MSN, ICQ through transports), 1 sip connection, data plan widget slow refresh, calendar widget, conversations widget, fmtx widget, 2-4h xmms2 music playing, maybe a ssh connection from time to time, a conversation or two, maybe a 1 minute phone call, 30 minutes of hex-a-hop playing.

Trying now more or less the same but with 3G only connection will see how it goes.