I'm sorry to hear that... it looks there are multiple battery related issues here (somebody was also talking about old sim cards draining the battery)

Today I had the battery draining again, after a couple of hours the full battery was only half full and guess what? When I tried to turn on wifi the device would not find any wifi signal (there are multiple wifi spots in my area, not only my router).
So in my case I would definetly say that the battery drain is in some way related to the wifi hanging.

The good news for now, is that I have tried typing what Laughin Man suggested:
ifconfig wlan0 down, ifconfig wlan0 up
in xterm (after gaining root access with rootsh)
and I was able to recover wifi functionality.
I will have to check if battery draining stops at this point, but I would suppose it should.

Thanks for the tip I'll try it next time. I am a bit shamed of ranting yesterday but since my user experience with the device has been constant struggling with battery I was extremely frustrated.

This is my checklist so far:

• Uninstalled all SW not necessarily needed
• Configured all the widgets accessing internet to be updated manually only
• Disabled most of the desktop widgets
• Forced the email client to update manually only
• Disabled automated network scans
• Switched the phone to 2G network only
• No TCP/IP connection
• Closed GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi
• Got a brand new SIM card from my operator
• Monitoring any rampant processes using top, powertop and load applet

What I haven't tried yet is to replace battery, charger or charger adapter with a new one. The charger adapter could be the culprit since using it the charging seems to take quite a long time and it makes sometimes a high pitched whizzing sound.

I tried the ifconfig trick (sudo gainroot->ifconfig wlan0 down->ifconfig wlan0 up) and it doesn't affect the battery drain problem.
Anyway I experienced battery drain but NOT problems with wifi hotspot search.

Wifi works fine on my n900, but every time I switch it on it starts to drain battery, and I have to reboot to stop it.

So imho the problem is related to wifi in a non-linear way.

Anyone been playin xvid/divx movies on this? Any idea how many hours playback you can get out of it?

I'm considering getting a zaggsparq for when I will be on the road, or gone for 12+ hours or when I know I will have some extensive use. I have done some testing as well and with 3g network:

- 2nd full charge of the device, before that I used it plugged in as I don't have my screen proctectors and I'm sick with flu resting at home. I have used it for 6 days though, and pretty much installed lots of applications from the extras, and a few from extras-testing.
- facebook widget disabled, weather widget, and some others active.
- 3g network online (but inactive), no wireless
- some browsing 30minutes (gmail, facebook, maemo forums and no flash content if I remember correctly)
- little talking maybe 5 minutes
- IM services and email offline
- network search offline
- took 3 photos
- recorded a 45 second video and broadcasted it via qik
- Desktop widgets set to update every 4+ hours
- some gps used due to pictures/videos taken wşth geo-tagging

I got around 17 hours of battery life.
Now with extreme (but planned) using, I bet that this device can take 7-8 hours at most, which is not that bad actually considering that during the day most people get a chance to plug it someplace.

I have not tested battery life with videos or mp3s, but I bet the device can handle media without issues and it's the radios that cause most issues.

I had some battery issues with N810 long time ago and reason for that was bad wlan hotspot. On that network there was some badly configured windows servers which send every second many broadcast packets. It killed the battery on my N810 very fast.

So if you have issues on some networks and you know how to use wireshark or tcpdump try to look if thats a problem.

btw, how long does it take for you to charge your device from a dead battery to full charge?

I'm using the USB charger, and it seems to be taking more than normal (what is normal) although the problem could indeed be not enough power being supplied from my notebook.

Started a bug for this, go vote for it so maybe someone will pay attention and try to fix it in the next OTA Update...

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6615

...along the thread you've focused on several possibilities of what may be draining the device's battery, and although i haven't got my n900 yet (stupid NOS.es), in my experience with the N95, the accelerometer could also be a battery hog: when i ran the step-counter application, it could cut my battery performance by up to 50%...

...so just pitching an idea...

No; I live in The Netherlands and use Vodafone (with a brand new sim card). (sorry for the late response).