you are right. the iphone battery life is a farce..my wife has an iphone and the only way u can use IMs like skype is by turning them on when you need it and shutting it down after that. you can't have it running in the background(at least as far as I know)......ANY phone could do that!!!!....
the n900 actually runs all these applications continously in the background...

i have been experiencing disappointing battery life recently, lasts about 24 hrs on average since last fw update. definitely worse than before the update.

For me personally I don't want to degrade performance of my N900 by tweaking a few things here and switching a few apps off when not in use.

The whole point of this phone is that it can do some cool stuff and that it's like a computer in your pocket. It's no fun having to be so very conservative with use so that the battery gets through the day.

I bought this phone to use it and whilst I am 'not over the moon' with the battery performance I don't want to carry it around with almost everything switched off. I want to be able to browse the web whenever I want and to play some games when I'm stuck in a queue and listen to music or watch a film or read a book without having to worry.

THE SOLUTION TO POOR BATTERY PERFORMANCE:

Well for me it was to buy 3 spare batteries and a desktop charger. The batteries costs me about a fiver and seem to be great value and it means now that when I go long haul in a few weeks, that I'll be able to read, listen to music and watch films on my N900 without worrying about the battery.

Hi!

Does anyone knows what is this procsess where its relates omap2_mcspi?

Its eats my battery very fast, i could get rid of it only by booting n900.

Stupid question, where is the option to use only 2G or Edge networks?

Yes, I also bought a desktop charger and two spare batteries, with good results. I avoid eBay and just Googled bl-5j to find the batteries. The batteries I got look identical to the Nokia battery except in price.

I found that the batteries get much easier to install after the plastic door wears a bit.

settings--->phone--->network

For me pulseaudio has been suspicious lately. Something was gnawing my battery but could not determine what because top showed no spesific load anywhere. Since pulseaudio was mentioned here earlier I noticed that it was there with a load of 2-3%. I run powertop and noticed that the processor spent most of the time at state C2. After killing the pulseaudio process the most common state were C3 and C4 (as supposed I think).

Noticed some odd behavior yesterday. Battery was being drained really quickly all day. By the time I left work around 6pm, lshal reported the battery at 12%.

I left my cable at home, so couldn't charge it.

Went to see some family (media with FM transmitter on the 40 min drive) and was showing off the phone with the usual bounce, video, FM transmitter, browser, camera, video camera, etc.

Checked battery again (now 7pm ish) and I'm at 7%. Hmm.... That was only a 5% drop with quite a bit of heavy demo usage.

Left the thing in my pocket, and it started beeping at me around 9pm. Didn't check % though.

Got home around 11pm and was at 6% with FM transmitter on the way home. At this point I was already getting suspicious so I was actively trying to drain it. Did some wifi browsing on the couch, but it wouldn't die. So I left it unplugged and it died during the night some time. Charged it for an hour before work in the morning.

It's been on 3G all day, did some software updates and checked some email and I'm still at 77% at 6:30pm.

I'm thinking that in my case, the circuitry in the battery needed to find it's actual low point. If it were really at 12% yesterday after work, it should have died on the trip to my family. And it certainly should have died through the demo. Or using FM transmitter going home.

Hopefully, my good battery life will last more than just today.

Download the 2G/3G selection applet, streamlines the process, saves you having to dive into settings every time you want to use 3G.