Not that I can find any info on, no. The N96 came with a 950mAh BL-5F battery - you could cram the 1200mAh BL-6F battery into it, but it was never sold with that. The N95 8GB also had a higher capacity battery than the original N95, but that wouldn't fit properly in the older model.

In the early days, moving from NiCad to NiMH, and more recently from NiMH to Lithium batteries, you could get higher capacity replacements (though I'm not aware of the original manufacturers releasing these), but things have been pretty steady for a while now. The latest advancements seem to be more in the area of charge rate and life span, rather than capacity.

I've been waiting for this for quite a while, but got annoyed by the battery life on my N900 a bit too much and bought an a-grade replacement battery for a tenner from bonus batteries... Now I'm incredibly happy - if I'm running out, I just switch batteries. Sorted. That'll keep me going just as long as this new monstrosity. I certainly won't be buying it!

There's a BL-10C battery sold in the US for a specific model, comes with new back cover, twice as thick, replaces BL-5C.

And they also had a bigger battery for the 1610. It doubled the thickness, and the battery's plastic cover followed the shape of the SubC cylindrical nimh cells the battery was built out of. Total size was approximately half a brick.

And there is a photo or video - to look more close what does it look like?

There's just the "draft" photo (not sure whether that's a photo of a draft version, or a draft version of a photo) which shows very little (and nothing positive).

Well it's hard to tell, but it looks like it doesn't have a lens cover. If that's the case, it's a deal-breaker for me. It's one of the most important hardware features on the phone for me.

It would also render my nice leather carry case useless as it's way too thick to fit.

Damn.

Based on the draft photo, this thing is an abomination.

We could all do with a higher capacity batter but not at this price (either financial or size/weight/looks/functional) - it doesn't tick any of my boxes, other than that for capacity.

Let's see... no kickstand, cheap looking camera cover, and ridiculous thickness - I had hoped they would just square off the hump on the back of the N900 making it totally flat and no thicker than the camera section alread is, ie. just a couple of extra mm's thickness. But this is waaaay too much additional thickness.

Then again, it's just a draft photo - let's hope it's a very bad and completely unrepresentative draft photo!

If it's not, I'll just hold out for a Powermat Powerpak battery.

I'll be happy keeping my N900 fully charged just by plopping it down onto a Powermat on my desk while at work (the "oncharge" system sound will then become very annoying and have to go - I can feel another "enhancement" bug report coming just for that) and same when at home. By the time I leave work in the evening the N900 will always be fully charged as it's been topping up throughout the day.

I think the Powermat Powerpaks are due in June, and hopefully the N900 will be supported.

I can only imagine the Mugen battery will appeal to hardcore types who might not go near a power socket for a day or so.

I'd assume the powermat won't be using the usb subsystem to charge (probably a direct connection from the receiver coil to the battery's electronics), so the phone won't even be notified when it's receiving power. Sound shouldn't be a problem.

Ah yes, good point! Though not sure how bme will like that, suppose it shouldn't be a problem... hope it doesn't freak out when the battery charge level slowly increases despite no input from the USB side of things.

Unfortunately this does not take advantage of the extra space around the battery, above the plane of the original battery. This is (almost) twice the surface area of the original. Doubling the width and making a staggered design would yield nearly3x the volume of BP-5L. However the cost for a non-box shaped battery could easily be far higher than this mugen.

To those complaining about price: they have to cover design and production costs. We do not know what the proportions are here. For e.g. if they have $60,000 fixed costs and $27 unit cost per battery, they need to sell 1000 of these to break even.

To those complaining that a larger capacity battery is necessarily bigger, get a chemistry or physics or materials science degree and design a better battery technology.

Hahahahahahahaha. Hurrrr. Durrrrr.

....