I don't use msn, but have heard complaints that it's a battery muncher. Anyway intergrated im is one of my favorite things on the N900, so you'll have to pry that from my cold dead hands

That doesn't sound right. Just off the top of my head, do you perhaps have the gps enabled, trying desperately to get a signal while indoors?

Same here, 1 desktop, no widgets, little wifi/gsm, music etc.
4-6 hours and i have about 20% left.

i agree about signal strength. A weak signal means the phone is fishing more for a decent signal and hops between 2 and 3g. This happened to me when I switched to my 3 sim. Battery life plummetted. Gone back to Voda and its recovered quite a bit actually.

As soon as I saw the advert of it for the first time I immediately fell in love in it. Pointing downsides of the battery seems a bit funny to me because people seem to miss great functionality that this device has. I feel bit sad that I was always a windows fan scared of linux cause now maybe I could mod it on my own, but I have to rely on other people like you. But Im slowly learning I even installed Easy Debian on it .

That makes my point, I was always kind of a mobile freak and I love to test every new stuff that is such widely promoted. My previous one was I8910 HD, but now its gone to my wife , I had G1 as well, N95, N97 and really rally I love my N900!!! I would never swap it for anything else now. I liked Symbian, but Maemo is abso-fcukin-lutely FANTASTIC.

Please stop complaining about the battery if you want to use your mobile for 5 days buy a N3310. I was totallz expecting this after seeing possibilities of this baby. Im telling You, use it wisely and it will give you so much love...

Look at my settings, I think thats a basic stuuf, but maybe somebody missed something?

This was just an experiment:
I can get 3 days with one charge, 3g on, data connection over 3.5 always on, MFE sync every 30 mins between 9-18; weather sync every 4 hours. Browsing, youtube, music, no more than an hour per day. Phone calls about an hour also continuous. Also I put it offline in the night. For me this is very reasonable.

In Bucharest we don't have any problems with signal by the way, everywhere is pretty strong. For example I have an E51 which I charged once per week in Bucharest and every two days in Paris with the same usage.

For those who get less than a day with this kind of using scenario, I think you should return your phone.

After Update battery issue for me is fixed. Maybe due to some apps that were wiped and I don't want to reinstall em. Also I followed the nice thread about fixing the battery life.
I charged the phone and was listening to audiobook at night thru wifi. The book is based on Flash. After 2h the book stops and when I wake up in the morning I have almost full bar on phone with 3 opened browsers running. Listen to Inet Radio in the car for about 45mins, did not turn off 3g at work, a couple of calls, a couple of utube videos, and my battery started crying only around 5pm. I would not call it a bad battery life.

chrismint I actually had the same problem. There is a work around for now until Nokia plugs that hole. What you have to do is go to Settings Internet Connections and Turn off Select Wi-Fi when available. Make sure you have ur cellular APN as the default for connect Automatically. What happens is that whenever you connect to wifi even though ur phone is out of range or ur wifi hotspot is keeps searching and aht drains the battery I tested it and by turning off switch to wi-fi when available and putting my APN as the connect automatically option I have had over 12 hrs so far...and I have MFE which syncs automaticalls. If you connect to Wi-Fi disconnect and then reboot your device and connect back to ur Cellular APN. That should help for now.

I run MSN and Skype IM all the time and with the above settings it actually works. More info can be found here:http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36438

It takes ~5 charging from empty to full before battery life really gets better. I do not know why it like that but something to do charging program inside n900 to calibrate itself to battery.