Well, Well Well.... i got 17hrs yesterday. I turned off Data,wifi BT on the phone was on but my BT ear piece was turned off. 3g was on ALL day. The day started for me around 6am. Every now and then i turned on data to get email and did a little surfing. Around noon i still have over 70% of battery life left. Around 6pm i used it heavily chatting and talking on the phone. Around 11pm battery was still around 43% remaining. Today i will leave BT ear piece on do different things to see what will happen with battery life.

PS so far since 6am when i took it off the charger. Xterm using lshal reports as follows:

6:00am: battery.reporting 1190 mAh - 94%
8:21am: battery.reporting 1003 mAh - 79% --at this point i turned on Data...hopefully it should turn its self off
8:44am: battery.reporting 981 mAh - 77%

Sticker in the back under battery I believe

I have 4 IM Accounts running and SIP all the time.
5 Emails accounts: 3 IMAP, 2 POP3
Weather Gadget Loaded and updating every hour over WLAN
Data plan monitor running.
Calendar Widget running.
Load Applet on too.
Run a fair amount of this forum on 3G (or 2/2.5G when signal reduces) to about a couple of hours a day.
About an hour or so of voice calls over 3G
Around 7 hours of connection to WiFi in the office (power dropped which helped)
Around 60 odd texts each way each day and lots of email activity too.

Phew - Well that's all I can think of but I get around 9-10 hours a day.

I have found that when I am in a marginal area where switching between 3.5/3/2.5/2G that the battery goes into a dive.

that would be my next test sometime next week

are higher capacity batteries a possibility as an optional extra?

Nothing official out yet but there are external power sources that plug into the MicroUSB socket to effectively power the phone.

i believe mugen is working on a battery.

I think the thing that drains battery the most is searching for a cellular connection. put the N900 into offline mode as the metro went underground and battery didn't decrease as much over that 45 min period. Otherwise the tablet would just be getting a connection each time it entered a station and losing it 3 min later as the subway went back into the tunnel.

Most cell devices (phones et al) will increase their power rating in an attempt to contact a tower when their signal goes. I am not aware of any device that has the common sense to realise after a frantic search that nothing is talking to it and tone the requests down a touch. end result - put a switched on mobile in your pocket when entering a decent elevator and you'll microwave everyone by the tenth floor!

hope that makes enough sense to explain your experience. This is also a similar effect when switching modes but no where in the same league.

I am a heavy skype user and tend to get a fair number of messages. I always leave WiFi and 3G on and browse the internet from 1 - 3 hours a day. I have e-mail set to poll every half hour and last weekend I had vnc viewer running most of the time.

I have never had a case where I "needed" to charge during the day. The only time I have done so is when I wanted to test the legacy charger converter.

Sorry to be boring, but I have no problems to report.

Well 13-16 for me though I think that's not as accurate as it could be.

Basically this is the trend for me for the last two days:
2.5G, 1 jabber connection(this also sends me mail notification through the Jabber Mail Component, and links me through to MSN, ICQ through transports), 1 sip connection, data plan widget slow refresh, calendar widget, conversations widget, fmtx widget, 2-4h xmms2 music playing, maybe a ssh connection from time to time, a conversation or two, maybe a 1 minute phone call, 30 minutes of hex-a-hop playing.

Trying now more or less the same but with 3G only connection will see how it goes.