i suggest you guys could try the app wifi switcher..whenever am not on wifi i use this app to disable wifi..my battery life went up from 5hrs to 10 hrs since i started doing this..

I very rarely charge with the USB PC Charger, its usually charged with the mains charger and I only have it on the USB now cos im too lazy to walk in the other room to get the mains charger LOL

i think something is happening when disabling/enabling wireless...
such procedure seems to drain battery quite quicker then when leaving wireless alone after a reboot.

my phone very much picks up my work wifi in the day and battery lasts all day, while opening a few rss news feeds here and there throughout the day and checking a few other pages.
if i turn off/on wifi without then rebooting battery drains quick quick.

imo it must be some process running in the background.

gps/agps and bluetooth imo are also the biggest n900 energy drainers, so i recommed disabling these permanently.

does anyone know how to create a desktop button to soft reboot the n900?

The other day I changed my email settings from "Update when connected via: Wi-Fi" to "update when connected via: Any connection".

Later in the evening while I was visiting a friend (bad 3G reception), I noticed that my n900 was very hot and the battery had dropped from almost full to around 20% within an hour.

I was worried that the Lithium battery was about to explode, so I turned the phone off and removed the battery. After I got it home, I changed the setting back and charged it up - so far no more issues.

There was a previous issue where my phone would lock and I found it to be battery related (was running empty even though the widget said it was fully charged): http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=48059

Other than these battery issues the n900 is really cool... it's a painful price to pay for freedom.

You should be able to execute a 'reboot' command ('halt' to shutdown). If this needs to be done as root try: "rootsh su - -c reboot".

I think there is a way to create a button which executes a command?

my battery got to 0%, and i was able to play VGBA for 45 mins, and listen to 2 songs before it just said "thats enough" and shut off..

i think we need a more precise battery monitor for the top of the devicer because the battery can be at 40% and the battery in the notification area says 3/4...

You can run: "lshal | grep percent" in xterm.

This value only updates periodically (and doesn't update while charging), but I still find it more accurate than the battery icon.

2g was dead in my area this week. I noticed 3g was consuming lots, killed xchat, didn't improve much. Then I killed openvpn, it was doing a ping every 20s. That brought traffic down to like nothing, except for this one guy who thought I'm an edonkey server and kept knocking on a port regulary. Reconnected, got a different IP and now power consumption was manageable..

The thing to remember about 3g is that a single packet of internet traffic consumes almost as much power as full tilt download for 5s... In other words, any traffic keeps the radios active for quite a long time after, which makes all sorts of low rate traffic like IM consume large amounts of power.

It's operator dependent, and I'm told my operator has particulary bad configuration for always-on 3g...

that works. Something is really wrong with the icon then. My battery icon shows almost full (80~90%) but the xterm shows only 69%. wow, that icon is really off...

They appear to use two different mehods for estimating remaining power..