Ah, that would be nice, but I don't think it's possible. At least not from me. I'm not much of a hardware guy -- the closest I get to it is through communicating with the device driver, and there's nothing in the driver I can tweak to increase the LED's power. (BTW, I've gotta admit, if you ever want to learn how to write code that works with a device driver in Linux, this is the device you want to start with -- it's gotta be the simplest mechanism ever. You turn the LED on. You turn it off. You turn it on again. You turn it off again. That's pretty much all you can do with it. I just love simple devices. )

From what I've seen, my N900's IR has pretty much the same range as most of my other remote controls, so I would guess there isn't much more to be done with it.

(BTW, there are lots and lots of "IR repeaters" and "IR->RF" devices out there to extend the range of standard remote controls, if you need more range for particular devices...)