Thankgod for this thread!
I am absolutely in love with the N900 and hopefully santa will drop one in for me for christmas
However i was becoming very nervous about all the things that had been said about it having a terrible battery life throughout various threads.But now i can see that the people having problems are only a small minority and that the majority of people are easily getting a days usage out of it , which is plenty enough for me

Yeah I made another post earlier today about mine suddenly working great. It's definitely improved, not sure why though, not a battery engineer.

This morning I had it off the charger for almost 4 hours, and when I plugged it up, it immediately said the battery was full and I got a green light.

*shrug* Was awesome.

Ah, sounds good. I don't intend to use the built-in GPS at all anyway (I have a Holux for when I need one), and network positioning is another I don't need. It's good to know that actively turning this off will make a difference on the battery.

Up to 8 hours right now, did minor tweaking to the n900. Turned off GPS and bluetooth since I only turn them on when I use them and I lowered the brightness by one since I found it too bright. Haven't installed anything besides extras applications.

Though I have noticed that when your device is looking for a signal it thrashes the battery. My Metro ride made the n900's battery lower a bit since it would connect to TMobile, then lose connection as I went through a tunnel, and rinse and repeat.

Hopefully TMobile, AT&T, and Sprint will catch up to Verizon in underground Metro service (they only recently added service for major metro stations underground). Verizon is the only one that lets you talk while taking the metro through tunnels though there are still places where calls will drop out.