I still pick pick wifi over longer battery life. There's a reason you have
chargers for and they include two of them.

apple

Type:
sudo gainroot
into the terminal and issue the command:
ifconfig wlan0 down

Are you sure that it is crashing and not freezing up for a bit? I leave wifi on all the time, usually so I can
ssh in to the n900. From time to time my session locks up for a while, even while I am typing. After a few seconds or minutes, it frees up again as though nothing had happened and all the characters that I typed while it was frozen show up.

Changing powersaving from maximum to medium helped a bit, but did not eliminate the problem.

Is there a way to create a control environment for people to compare battery charge life?

like no sim inserted and no widgits with wifi switched off and gsm/3g etc all turned off?

if there is a controlled environment set up then people can determine if they have a hardware fault or a software fault.

it will also allow them to enable 1 thing at a time for testing purposes and see what it is thats killing their batteries in 7 hours.

i would suggest a script that disables everything.

Trying to figure out whats wrong with everyones phones is to hard when there's too many variables so limit the amount of variables and keep the phones the same. use a good battery life phone and a bad battery life phone and enable 1 thing at a time and see what happens.

i don't have the n900 yet because ireland hasn't got any nokia love yet so i can't test this. but i do know from experience in work that a control environment is what you need for diagnosis of issues.

a question about USB via computer charging and usb power outlet charging, are they the same? sometimes i find the power charging outlet to be more faster

on the side note, my device was fully charged 10 hrs ago, i turned off the device and left it, now its been 8 mins and i have put it on charge via computer and the battry is not full

edit: it took about 30 mins for the light to become green again :s...

The USB charger that came with the phone is 5 V and 1.2 A. Typical computer USB ports can only provide 0.5 A. As such, charging will be much faster on the USB charger.

I notice my phone drain battery pretty fast too....like in the morning...my phone is fully charged. Of course, when i turn it on it will connect to wi-fi automatically in my house. So then i head to work and use Tmobile 3G. I didn't do much other than txting messages all day and maybe surf a couple mins of websites. That's it...my phone is basically idled the whole day from 6am to 2:30pm..that's 8 hrs and YET THE BATTERY DRAIN TO ZERO!!!!!

I think you're right about wi-fi drainage of battery..because i didn't use the phone much at all and yet it drained in less than 8hrs.

yep same for me. testing now.

disabled my wifi in terminal(sudo gainroot, ifconfig wlan0 down) and connected to the 3g network all day. been surfing the net for a total of 1 hour. downloaded an app. sent about 20 sms's (gf dramas).

disabled omweather using the internet. only manually update (this could be one of the issues here, you guys should have a look to how this thing is set up. i turned off GSM, WLAN in the settings and update to never. and made sure i only selected my state and no gps locations.)

my battery is at 70% after 6 hours. not bad at all. best day so far.
first time i was able to stay connected to the 3g without fast draining.

hopefully a fix through a firmware update comes before christmas

Does wifi access point have an effect here as well? Old wifi routers do not have all power saving possibilities supported. I am using Apple airport extreme. n900 connects to home wifi automatically and stays connected about 14h per day (Skype and Gtalk and 3 mail accounts) othervise with 2G connected in office 8h and about one hour in car bluetooth. Few calls and sms per day, with 2G I get about 30h usage and dual 2G/3G mode about 6h less.

Maybe I test without wifi but I seems not to cause too much drain on my environment.