HI,

I have a new N800 and am perplexed by the lack of battery life. If I fully charge the unit overnight, then turn it on, by the next day the battery is dead (and obviously the unit will not turn on).

I have the settings to turn to screen off after 1min and to enter the standby mode after 5min. I have 2x2Gb SD cards.

This is NOWHERE close to the standby times stated by Nokia, and frankly it's useless if it needs to be charged every day.

Any ideas? Thanks.

if you have an active wifi connection, the rss feeds will update and things like connection keep-alive packets will be sent, so the unit is active and connected. if you want the most of your standby time, put the device into offline mode before you put it into standby mode.

another option, when you are not near a configured wifi access point, is to turn off the search feature for the wifi. this will stop it from searching for access points to connect to. again the offline mode will accomplish this, but you also loose the bluetooth connections with offline mode.

Brendan,

Thanks for the tip. I think you may be correct, since it's at home (active wifi connection) when it's in standby and thus runs out of power. Thanks.

Although Brendan's tips are good, there's evidence that some Wi Fi access point connections drain the N800 unreasonably quickly. If you search around for people complaining about their N800 dying overnight, this is what you'll find. I personally see this -- I have two APs in my home: one kills the N800 overnight, the other can be connected to in standby for days. As far as I know, there's not solution to this yet, but if you have an old AP lying around, you might try setting it up and seeing if the improves things.

Another good option is to just keep it plugged in when it's not in use.

@orangegoat

would there be logic to the idea that one of those APs is configured for keep-alive packet transmission or rekeying at a high rate or short interval?

when my N800 would die overnight it was because of a bad SD card and some process trying to read the card all night long would use up all the CPU and so the battery would get used up.
formatting the SD card helped to fix it.

I charge my n800 every 3 days or so and I really use it a lot. When at home n800 is always connected with skype opened. To get the best out of the n800 battery its best to charge it until it displays its full and then deplete the battery atleast a couple of times and recharge to the fullest again! Try not to charge overnight since it charges pretty fast even if its charging with the unit ON. Leaving it plugged in all night might result in overcharging it and that kills battery life! I get about 7 hours of use with a 30 minutes of browsing every now and then but mostly mauku,pidgin,email.

I was wondering about this too, since when the N800 is not in offline mode, the SD cards are still available, which would cause additional current drain, a bad card could cause other problems as you noted. What process was doing this, do you know? Thanks.

As for overcharging, I'd really be surprised that this could even be possible with a smart device and a Li-ion battery which are known to explode when overcharged.

As for the suggestion of keeping it plugged in, what's the point of a 'portable' device if it needs to be plugged in? Thanks but no, there must be some other problem.

Thanks for all the ideas!

I saw some meta-crawler or something running with high CPU.
It was easy to test by just removing the SD card and then my battery life went back to days rather than hours.