N900 Battery Tests Part 2

Looking back to my recent post about the battery performance of the N900, I thought I’d do an update about the battery performance I’ve been experiencing since the tests were carried out.

To recap, four tests were carried out which looked at the standby performance, active online usage, music playback and day-to-day usage. (See the post above for the full results)

Now since a few more charges of the battery, I decided to re-measure the performance and here’s what I found:

Rather than re-do all the tests as before, I decided to measure the key things (in my opinion); Active Online Usage & Day-to-day performance.

Active Online Usage:

Active Online usage: connected to Wi-Fi/3G/2G with IM conversations etc happening.

Official: 24 hours
Test 1: 9 hours

This test: Recently I’ve been getting about 14-16 hours usage every day now on average.

Day – To – Day Usage:

Day – to – day usage. This test was performed by me and is based upon averages over the last few days. There is no official time for this so I’ll list my findings anyways.

Test 1: 9 hours on a full charge with Wi-Fi/3G connected, IM conversations open & several short calls & texts.

This Test: 15 hours on a full charge… Constant Wi-Fi / 3G connection, constant IM conversations & several short-medium length calls (roughly the same number of texts as the first test!)

First things first, I instantly wondered why the battery life improved drastically with use & I can only think that from a fresh start it takes the coding behind Maemo 5 to significantly improve battery usage… Also the battery itself may take 3-4 charge cycles in order to actually improve.

Secondly, this second test was done with several different apps installed on the device & the device was always using at least 250mb ram (out of 1gb) which makes it even more impressive, given that on a fresh install & the basic apps used in test 1, ram usage was generally 130-150mb.

Leave your thoughts in the comments!