I'm considering buying a n810 to go hicking and use it as a gps device (using maemo mapper)
I have a N800 and a bluetooth gps, in such use the battery life is about 8H (gps and n800 link on all time, just looking from time to time the n800 and tracking activated)
however I often loose link with the gps device and this unreliability is a real bother when safety is in concern...

I looked into garmin gps but the mapping facility of garmin is rather poor... you have to use a proprietary map format and the unit that can use jpeg scanned/downloaded maps are at high price... much more than the n810...

so my question is how much battery life might I expect from n810 with the gps in use?

the test conditions : gps on and track loging activated, device is woke up one or 2 times per hours with an average use of 1 to 2 minutes...

thanks and regards
JLM

Should be about 5 hours.

that seems like an awfully low figure for such low usage.
Without gps I can wake my device up as often as required all day long for a few minutes at a time and not notice the battery moving.

Does it really cost that much battery to listen to gps that I couldnt get through a workday?

why "should" ? I read on another thread that the gps unit use less power than the bluetooth link.... if true it should be more than 8h no?

There's a lot of speculation in a lot of threads...

I don't know, but I'd expect the GPS to use more power than talking to a BT GPS (which is mostly receiving). Could be wrong, of course; I haven't done any research, as I don't have an N810 and almost certainly would not use its GPS much if I had one. (I've got two BT GPSes already.)

well I noticed that the bluetooth link is awfully hungry.... I done several testing for comparing bluetooth@10mW versus Wifi@10mW and while I can keep a 54Mb/s link up 15m away between 2 walls with the wifi, I can't even keep the bluetooth link up 1m away... when I activate bluetooth the battery life consume really fast... leading to 8h of use on the n800...
for me the issue is the gps not the n800

can someone make a test? I just need to know if it can go higher than a whole hicking day (best case would be 16h up)
thanks
JLM

Using MaemoMapper and having GPS on and display on my battery lasts about 4 hours. Having display off most of the time should increase the time, that's why I said about 5 hours. The GPS chip when tracking continuously does use quite a bit of juice. Before when I had N800 and external Bluetooth GPS my usage time was longer.

Certainly you'll not get nowhere close to 8 hours... unless you buy that Mugen 3000mAh battery...

Actually that battery's 3600mAh (I believe you're the first I've seen to get the capitalization right on mAH, BTW).

It really helps, but I'm still not sure it'd get you 16 hours with Maemo Mapper; I'd just get an auxiliary power pack to recharge it...

did someone tried without maemomapper but with the cgpxlogger from gpsd package?