Are you wondering where is all that battery juice of your N900 disappearing? If you have to plugin your N900 after like every 6-7 hours, then let me tell you that you are bitten by one of the software bugs either of one of those applications you recently downloaded or those in Maemo 5 itself!

A number of users have been complaining about less than average battery performance on their N900 and was wondering what was all the hype about, when I was able to get about average battery performance from my trial unit of N900 from WOM World. So I headed straight to the abode of Maemo 5: Maemo.org and the N900 forum there infact had all the answers to my queries.

Before I dwell into the battery tweaks of N900, let me add a few spoilers here so that you can skip the read, if you have already made these tweaks on your N900. Tweaks related to Wi-Fi settings and disabling some of the data intensive widgets on the homescreen. If you haven’t, then hit on the read button to know more about these tweaks.

Wi-Fi settings

One of the most impressive features of the N900 is its capability to change to available Wi-Fi (if you have already saved this connection) automatically everytime you enter into this Wi-Fi reception zone. While this may save you hundreds if not thousands of bucks on data charges especially if you are not on an unlimited data plan, it drains your battery at an alarming rate. It’s in best interest to disable this feature as most of the time you wouldn’t be needing a data intensive connection like say when you are at work or at home and not really digging the capabilities of your N900 as you engage in your daily chores.

The best solution that I could think of was to disable this feature whenever I was at work and home and not downloading anything that might burn a hole in my pocket on my N900. However, I would turn this feature ON, when I was downloading say a video podcast or that graphics intensive game on the N900.

Widgets

Widgets gotta be one of the coolest features of N900 but unfortunately they also suck the juice out of the battery like a vampire feasting on its victim’s blood! Well, may be I went a little overboard with the analogy but I guess you get my point. The important thing is to tweak the settings on these widgets, to suit your requirements. Like say you are someone who gets atleast a hundred mails a day, majority of which need immediate attention then you would probably set the email frequency to around 15 minutes. In this case you can play with settings of other widgets like of Facebook, Foreca etc and decrease their frequency. Some N900 users have also reported adding a couple of hours to their battery life just by disabling the music player widget!

So basically there is no standard solution as each user has his own requirements and its important to set priorities and tweak the widgets accordingly. How do you manage your widgets? Do share here if you have any interesting observations.