Nope.

A drop from 100mW to 10mW is a 10dB cut.

6dB less signal will reduce your range by 50%. 12dB less will reduce it to 25% of the initial range. So a 10dB cut will give slightly greater than 25% of the initial range.

If you could get 100m with 100mW, expect 25 to 30m with 10mW.

I've come to accept, a long time ago, that their are a lot of people that have, and will always have, bigger backyards than I do. Irregardless of how well my investments may ever do, I can live with the fact that I'll never have a home with a golden toilet, people working there whose sole purpose is to guide vistors in case they get lost, nor silverware which is thrown away after initial use.

But I find much comfort in the fact that I own both a tube amp, and an steel Italian bicycle.

no way! you have a steel itallian bicycle .... niiiiiice!

"Its in the name"...lol, I think so. I'm old school and afraid of carbon...and can't get with oversized tubes...but I digress.

This feature is mandatory for WiFi certification. It is not designed to save power and it should not be changed from the default (100 mW). http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=1838&postcount=10 Times have not changed much from 2005 in this sense

/thread

Indeed. It might just cause more retransmissions if the signal is weak, or, cause the link to reduce speed in order to increase the energy per bit.

I did a run round the main places i use my N900 in the house to test the quality (using Conky) once using 10mW and once using 100mW.
Here are the results

..........................100mW..........10mW
next to pc............100%..........100%
kitchen................63%..............60%
bedroom.............55%..............58%
toilet ............41%.............43%

so from that there is no difference to the quality on 10mW or 100mW it just depends on the question .... what extra battery time do you get.
Maybe i should fully charge the battery, stream in video on 100mW and see how long it takes till the battery dies then recharge and retry on 10mW

so, as you can switch back to the original value, the question is simple:

does it save battery-life or does it not?

[_] yes
[_] no

At idle, with no widgets, save for calendar and weather, and (3) POP3 email clients polling every hour, I can go about 24 hours per charge, given an hour or two of "use", with 10mW active "all day".

My Back yard is bigger than your whole neighborhood.

Sorry. Couldn't help myself. Just had to get into this "my back yard is bigger than yours" contest. LMAO

/hijack