Hey all. Thought I'd put some perspective on the battery life for people worried about this: it really isn't all that bad you guys!

I received my device yesterday and plugged it straight in. I'll wax lyrical about how much I love the device in another thread, but here's the skinny:

- Taken off charge (fully charged - but only the first charge) at 6PM, went home. Fiddled with it all the way home, long into the evening, played scrabble (flash) on facebook for a good few hours against my girlfriend (sitting next to me on the sofa - we're geeks, I know )

- Installed Bounce, Hermes, Ur-Quan Masters, Xournal, DrNokSnes, Leafpad, telepathy-butterfly, Facebook Widget and Photo Uploader (Though I removed the widget), Ogg Support, OpenSSH Client and Zeemote Control Panel (for DrNokSnes).

- Realised I forgot my charger and therefore can't charge it. If I had noticed this before 1AM I would've cut down on all the playing. Went to bed.

- To my surprise, my N900 woke me up at 7AM - still managing with the 'low battery' I left it with 6 hours earlier. Took girlfriend to opticians, where I was too bored NOT to play Super Mario World on DrNokSnes until she got out (a good hour of playing all in).

- 8:45AM, sat down at my desk and hooked up N900 to some much-needed power. Still not out of batteries.

Okay, so you guys: this was on the first charge - things can only get better. A good 8 hours of constant fiddling, with GPS on, switching between WiFi and 3G connections, about 1/2 hours worth of phone calls and around 6 hours of standby. I come from a communicator background (Nokia 9500, E90 - with an E61 in between) so I'm not used to the 5-day charge of some phones, but this is more than acceptable for me.

Just thought I'd give my 2 pennies, as this was a major concern for me when I was lurking about these boards before diving in and buying anyway ^_~ (oh, and it hasn't crashed once. Sounds like there's some dodgy units out there - or careless owners )

Darkshine,

I totally agree... after reading all the "speculation" and then getting the device, I am pleasantly surprised. I have noticed that with the last few charges it as gotten even better (as is typical with lithium batteries). As a new device I have been using it more than I might if I had been carrying it for a while... no complaints. The power management engineers have proven their worth.

Thor

Had the N900 about a week, and have seen the battery life improve substantially. Probably due to additional charge cycles as thorbo mentioned, but also I turned off GPS and Network Based location. I now get a full days average use of the device 7am-7pm, and can leave the device through the night without reaching the low battery the next morning.

The battery life normally is just fine. But there is a bug that causes the battery to die in less than 10 hours (maybe less than 6 hours) on full idle without any widgets whatsoever.

Currently it would seem that the bug is related to wifi connections, but my investigation on the matter is still a little in the way.

Anyway, my device first experienced the problem of the whole device being slightly warm to touch and battery draining very fast no matter the usage. Then I have experimented around trying to find the cause. Currently I have found out that at least normally, foreca weather, calendar, location and media player widgets do not cause excessive battery usage. Will report more once my experiments are finished.

Battery isnt bad, only maemo system without any powersaving function. Cheers! I have to recharge it in every 6th hour!

I dont suggest to leave your n900 online until auto gsm pocket/wifi disconnecting will be implemented into maemo 5!

The problem isn't about leaving connection on or not. Once you trigger the battery draining bug, it will use battery very fast no matter if you manually disconnect internet connection.

had the n900 for 4 days now. Battery life is really good now, watched a movie, talked skype and searched the web all day on it. half batt atm.

the only thing i saw drain the battery was Wi-Fi, but found a fix for that... change signal strength in Wi-Fi settings, from 100mW to 10mW. now i can be connected to my home WiFi for hours with out noticeable battery drainning.

See following post to fix low battery time issues:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=416799

In my case I had like 8 to 14h of battery in first days. but today morning i turned off availability. ( use to had skype connected all the time) and its already 14 hours and 40% remaining. And I have exchange push active, 3G and about 1 hour worth of calls in a day. So quite good, will try without 3G tomorrow.

Something that really increased my battery life was turning off the GPS and network positioning completely. In fact, I now have better battery life than my previous smartphone.