for anyone who doesn't want to whip out xterm & top to identify misbehaving processes, might i suggest installing Conky. (you don't actually have to download from there, it's conveniently found in the App Manager in the Extras repository already )
great system monitor, should come preinstalled IMHO. perhaps it will someday

My N900, which was bought just some weeks ago, has had very low battery life since the beginning.

Apparently those who bought N900 earlier and had the older firmware installed by default, experienced much longer battery life initially, and are now seeing a decrease of battery life with the latest update.

Those who had newer firmware installed by default (like me) already had the problem which seems to eat battery unnecessarily much, and do not experience any difference with the latest firmware update.

Hopefully it will be fixed with PR1.1

what firmware did you have on prior to update?

This is getting insane for me. Today I plugged out of the charger around 8AM and the battery logo was already red around 12.30PM.
Anything I can do to bring this back to the normal state what I was getting before the update?

Moment of Truth:

My test with this new update: Discharged at 8:30am

Played music from 9:20am -> 12:30pm. Battery say 85% (lshal|grep percen)

SMS 20times, Battery still say 80%


used qtirreco and left it on for 2hours. Go online for 1hour 30mins (email, browsing, and IDLE), battery say 60%

Screen light is 2Bars.

Played Angry bird for 1hour, battery say 35%
Played Solitaire and other games for 30mins battery say 31%
Leave it on Idle with a few tasks running.

Now is 8:16pm, battery say 30%
Edit: Now is 8:52pm, battery say 22%

so which meant 12hours and battery is 30% left from 97% full.

Which meant less hours than older firmware. Right now with the old firmware, the battery would still say 40 - 50% left with that usage.

So it is somewhat 10-20% of less power efficient. This probably related to the spiking up CPU usage all the time when opening task.

As for Bluetooth, it is not fixed. Still get the same problem while connected to my bluetooth headset.

Edit: Current status: Charging at 9:15pm, battery level is at 20%

Tomorrow testing light usage.

With the new latest firmware update, 2.2009.51

Disconnected at 9am get online on Maemo forum, browsing through google and a bit of youtube from 9am -> 11:46am battery down from 97%->55%.

Disconnect from the internet, and watched BEN10 on my N900 for 20mins. Battery down from 55%-> 37%.

Connect back to Wifi and watch 2 youtube short clips, battery down from 37% -> 34%.


Offline and now just SMS. 4hours later and battery say 33%

4hours and battery almost done for it!

This is still very inefficient in power consumption. The new firmware seem to lag sometimes.

Hi still having the same problem as before.

When setting the 'Internet connections'
automatic connection to any interval the battery drains.
seems like something is hanging when searching networks and drains immensely. (4 to 6 hours on 1 charge)

I always have it set to 'always ask/manual' and the problem is solved so I can normally work with the device for 2 days with a single charge.

The device is great, as long as I set the internet connection manually.
and (for me) really there is no reason why NOT to do it anyway, so for me its not a real problem :-)