Wifi consumes that much power if you are sending/receiving stuff. I managed to drain it to 5% within an hour by transfer of large files over wifi.
I have wifi on all work-day long 8 hours straight, a 30min gap when driving home and another 6 hours at home and sometimes it is on over night if I forget to turn it off and still make the +40 hours of battery-life.
Wifi settings are 10mW powersaving maximum (works for me).
'Device on' LED indication off.
Widgets are only updating when at view or on-click.
2G only as I do not use it most of the time.
I do not read my emails on the device if not needed so no updating there.
No python coded widgets that eat up my RAM on hildon-home (like Recaller).
I don't use a custom kernel and I do not use any advanced tweaks.

battery-eye-shot with the 3 day duration just at the beginning
https://bugs.maemo.org/attachment.cgi?id=2849


Even with no internet connection open 3G drains more power.
In bad reception areas you may try yourself. My standard phone only cell phone dropped from 100% charged to dead within 10 hours with connected to 3G network (no internet connection logged in) instead of up to 7 days with 2G (its normal GSM and EDGE if logging in to provider network)

Neither GTalk nor Skype need 3G bandwidth.

For what? If you do not look at it it doesn't matter if it is raining or not! Update at view is just enough.

Why refresh automatically? I have +50 new mails just overnight and another 50 in the morning hours... so I know there is new mail and it is up to me if I want to look, not up to my phone to annoy me with blinking or beeping or anything

Wi-fi surely seems battery friendly. I have the same settings as you and the battery drains about 12-14 % in six hours with few IM-accounts on.

Sorry for the delay but I was checking my online cpu activity for this days and I really think your N900 is taking much battery when online. I had run some tests and my online activity is very much lower, but the difference is I was over wifi. I can't try it over 3G because my provider does not allow it.
Here are some screenshots from battery eye:
First on standby Almost flat for several hours

Then on normal online use Not so inclined like yours


And here are on battery graph:
First on standby You can see that from 4pm the cpu stopped working and started to really save battery life to 11pm

Then on normal online useThe CPU activity isn't so bad with some browsing, calls and mail checking over wifi


So, I think the 3G is killing you, try to use 2.5G like me and change to 3G only if you need it. If someone call you over skype while you are on 2.5G you can tell them you will call on a minute, then you change to 3G (with the applet is quicker) and call over 3G, then switch back to 2.5G when you finish. It may seem annoying but is one option.

I should have said this before when i tried to hint that pfontana77´s phone is pretty much in format state if it depletes battery on that rate when in idle.

Normal things to do in that situation include (use search here and in wiki, both places are FULL of guides how to make battery last and how to debug these kind of problems)

- Remove all widgets..ALL!
- Take off ALL scheduled events (email checking etc.)
- Turn off ALL IM accounts
- Turn off gps
- Switch 2g only mode
- Remove all apps that install something on background. Or actually list programs what you have installed so that people can suggest what to do.
- Shut down phone and remove battery
- Put it back and restart
- Start to monitor battery depletion on bare minimum usage and one by one (~in week period) put stuff on and see how it affects battery usage
(Basically disable stuff until device is just "dumb" phone)

For future. This applies actually to all computers: You should never try to pin point problem with complex device just trying to tweak one thing or install apps. Of course it´s smart to ask first if there is some app that is known to be problematic. TURN OFF everything and start debugging by turning on stuff one by one. In long run you in most cases spare much of your precious time. And if problem persists backup and flash emmc+rootfs.

Also when you have disabled and uninstalled almost everything then processor should go in sleep state when you lock device. With powertop app you can monitor if some program keeps waking your processor from sleep.

I have noticed that turning off the gps from the settings doesn't affect anything. Has anyone opposite experiences?

That app removing should done by reflashing. Uninstalling might not cancel all the changes that they do to the phone.

Xorg process consumes 6-10% cpu all the time.....

when playing music
mafw-dbus-wrapp--- 10-17%
pulseaudio-- 7-12%

Is this normal?

I did something very simple. I installed a status bar icon that disables wifi entirely and switched to 2G mode.

I got back from a full workday and still had a half full battery. I listened to a lot of music through mediabox too.
When I want to do internet stuff I simply switch wifi back on and when I'm done switch it off.

Can u put a detailed info of what all acivities u performed and for how much time?

are u sure thats all the settings u had??
no tweaking or using any kernel or changing the frequency???

[QUOTE=slender;757754- Remove all widgets..ALL!
- Take off ALL scheduled events (email checking etc.)
- Turn off ALL IM accounts
- Turn off gps
- Switch 2g only mode
- Remove all apps that install something on background. Or actually list programs what you have installed so that people can suggest what to do.

Also when you have disabled and uninstalled almost everything then processor should go in sleep state when you lock device. With powertop app you can monitor if some program keeps waking your processor from sleep.[/QUOTE]

Why I need this device after that?

OMG my N900 is a beast. Of course I try really hard and I'm a "light" user. With a 900mhz overclock I getting approximately 4-5 days of battery life. After 24 hours I lose only 20 to 25 percent. This is with:

sending sms occassionally throughout the day
perhaps 20-40 min of web browsing over wifi
couple of phone/skype calls a day
use GSM only and use connectnow wifi thingy
use offline mode like no other

so essentially my phone is on standby most of the time, I don't have service (t-mobile) where I work (can't text or make phone calls there) and I do heavy web browsing on my laptop at home.

will do screenshots if asked or if i think significant