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Some time ago I was reviewing additional power supply for N900 but this is not the only solution. Let’s have a look at few possibilities.
Additional battery

This is what I’ve been doing several times with my previous phones and I’m also considering getting additional Nokia BL-5J battery this time. It’s good to have spare for few reasons, first of all you have backup when first one dies or get broken for some reason and it prolongs battery life in wider view.
In addition to that it’s good to have additional way of charging spare battery other than putting it into the phone and plugging the cable. There is possibility to get  desktop charger, so you can run cable-free with your N900 while your backup is charging.
You can get it from our store, we deliver to the whole world for free: Nokia N900 battery, Nokia N900 desktop charger.
Car charger

For everyone driving a lot Nokia Car Charger DC-6 should be good solution. It’s perfect if you’re using N900 as car navigation and need to stay in touch while on the road, there is no need for additional power source apart from car lighter socket.
Get it from our store, with free shipping to the whole world: Nokia N900 car charger
Portable charger

If it comes to mobility it’s nice to be able to charge the phone on the way. And here we have Nokia DC-11 Extra Power Backup Charger especially handy for those who want to use their phones while staying mobile and independent of stationary power sources. Compact, without unnecessary cables, easy to hide in pocket, great solution for staying on-line during long trips.
Get the backup charger with free worldwide shipping, from our store: Nokia N900 DC-11 charger
Solar Charger

Another option for mobility is solar charger, everything you need to use it is a bit of light and most of places on earth have at least few hours of constant daylight every day, other areas should have half a year of sunlight, even during nights .
Get it from here, with free shipping to the whole world: Nokia N900 …

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For those who already played with Maemo (or Linux in general) command line, the idea to put output from some commands should be already familiar. I was thinking of it also, trying few solutions and this is one of them.
Desktop Command Execution Widget is nice placeholder for shell scripts showing their output on homescreen, which may be useful if you want to have detailed info on N900 status on screen every time, without going to XTerminal and executing specified command. After you install the widget you will get several default scripts that can be placed on desktop and possibility to place more than one on homescreen, so you can get as many as you want! This can easily replace fixed widgets which show only one type of information if you know how to write appropriate script. Let’s start with something easy.
Example 1 – detailed uptime status
Linux users and network administrators may know significancy of big uptime, which means that hardware and software are working well and stable. Among the scripts you already have Uptime, Boot reason and Boot count, we can put all 3 of them on homescreen or modify to get all 3 in one by placing all commands (just copy using Ctrl+C and paste using Ctrl+V) one by one, separating with semicolon ( ; ) or double ampersand if you want to ensure the commands will execute properly in given order.
Example 2 – from the scripts wiki
Widget configuration gives option to see scripts wiki available on maemo.org, let’s take first one and see what it can do. This one uses AWK, powerfull tool for Linux users that will allow to freely manipulate command output and display in desired manner.
Example 3 – echo and favourite quote
You can place anything in this widget, like favourite quote using echo command, which will display the text you enter. So let’s say we want to have two lines with quote and author, we can use:
echo What quote says exactly && echo Author
More examples – try yourself
If you want to use something more try to look at ready commands and mix them in the …

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I’ve finally received it few days ago and tested it heavily for this time. Results are promising and I’m already sure it’s good piece of hardware that I can easily recommend to anyone (not only N900 users). But first things first…
You can easily buy (or check it’s detailed specifications) Proporta USB TurboCharger 3400 or other N900 charger (detailed specification available here) and it should be shipped quite fast (I was surprised that even recent volcano eruption haven’t issued delivery time).

After unboxing you get the charger itself and small sack with retractable USB cable, manual, various plugs, from which USB micro and mini are the most important and enough place to put charger itself. Everything looks pretty elegant, black box a bit smaller than N900, with  USB A socket for power input, USB mini socket for power output, one button and five blue LEDs to indicate current capacity. Out of the box it’s charget to about 70%, but I wanted to check it’s full potential. Charging is simple, just use the cable and USB mini plug with any USB port (i.e. in your computer).
Testing day 1
In the morning N900 and charger are fully charged, I started draining battery by using device a bit more than every day, this way in the evening I was getting ‘Battery low’ notification. I’ve connected charger to N900 using the same cable and USB micro plug. Charging speed is approximately the same as from computer, so I left it connected for the night and went asleep.
Testing day 2
Next day started with fully charged N900 and more than half of full capacity in charger. Again I was using device in power-draining way and around evening ‘Battery low’ showed up again. This time I connected charger and plugged N900 to TV to watch a movie. After approximately 1.5 hours movie ended, charging continued and I left it this way. When charger finally indicated that it’s empty N900 battery was charged to about 85-90% of full capacity.
Conclusion
This charger allows to extend time using N900 approximately 3 times! I think that from today it will be regular part of my …

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There are times when you go somewhere and suddenly you loose mobile network connection. This may happen for few reasons, mostly because of weak reception inside building, below ground level or somewhere in the wild, far from civilization. To check what is your signal level, and not only this, you can use NetMon Cellular Network Monitor from extras-devel catalogue.

Main purpose of NetMon is (as name suggests) monitoring mobile network, on main screen you can find most of important data like country (for me it’s Poland – 260) and network code (2 for me, one of 17 operator codes in Poland). You can also see other data like Cell ID and Local Area Code, a bit less important for everyday user, network status/type to see if it’s your home network or are you roaming on some other, supported services for the network, like GPRS capability and finally signal strength in decibel scale.

What is also interesting in NetMon is battery monitor, giving the most important information on current and maximum capacity, voltages, everything that may be useful not only for advanced users. This way you can track battery life depending on how you use N900 judging from something more than small icon in top-left corner.
I think that NetMon will become one of my everyday apps, I was missing such functionality earlier. Sometimes it makes me think that I’m some kind of control freak in case of mobile devices .
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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Yesterday I was writing about Nokia N900 battery saving methods, but there are situations when you need even more than that. Imagine you need stay in touch, make long calls, receive lots of e-mails while on the road and there is no possibility of regular charging in the meantime. What comes in my mind at first is external battery which I can connect and save the day. Apparently someone got to the same point and while digging the net I’ve found Nokia N900 AA battery powered emergency cell.
Such small charger called battery powered emergency for Nokia N900 looks like quite smart idea, worth to give a closer look. I still use AA batteries frequently for my flash-light, wireless headphones, portable radio set, wall clock and if I think more I will find more surely. Such batteries are available in many stores everywhere, so if you’re stuck with low (or no) power it’s not a problem to find AA battery in, I think, 10 minutes walk range. It’s even better if you use rechargeable as I do, you don’t need to buy new set every time. So in short:
Pros:

small and light (about 2.6oz – 74g)
uses standard AA cells
simple and elegant look
gives you additional battery time

Cons:

I don’t see any

AA battery powered emergency cell

So what can I add, I’d like to have it, to be sure that some day I won’t be left without power when I use all my battery playing chess during long trips by bus. Maybe you can make use of it too. You can buy this Nokia N900 Extra battery at Amazon. By the way, It is produced by Nokia.

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While browsing the web I’ve seen some discussions on what the N900 actually is. Some say it’s ‘obviously’ a smartphone, pretty advanced, based on Linux, but still smartphone. On the other hand it may be considered very small computer with phone application and hardware. All of this opinions have one mutual concept: Nokia N900 is mobile device. If it is, battery life is one of the most significant characteristics that people pay attention to.
Doing nothing with mobile device is the best way to let the battery live longer but I don’t think any of us bought N900 to let it be in stand-by all the time. Some of applications or widgets drain battery more when working in the background, for example:

instant messengers – most of them remain constantly connected to the internet, sending and receiving data and using CPU, so having many accounts connected al the time will drain battery faster
frequently updated widgets – similary to messengers if you have lots of widgets using your internet connection
bright screen backlight – more light is more battery drained
applications running in the background – some of those applications may use your processor and subsequently baterry
frequent e-mail accounts synchronization – especially the exchange account may cause battery drain if synchronized to often because it causes significant CPU load

So how to make your battery last longer? Let’s try few simple things:

lower screen brightness and backlight time, turn on energy saving and turn off screen vibrations (Settings, Screen)
swich IM status to offline when you don’t need to use it
change synchronization interval of your mail accounts to longer
prevent using frequently updated widgets, if you have the possibility change update interval to bigger or to update on demand or homescreen switch (like in Personal Dataplan Monitor widget)
turn off Bluetooth if you don’t use it (I find it also safer to remain hidden)
close application if you don’t need to use it for some time

If you need to check what is the best for you, try some of options and use battery-eye or BatteryGraph application to compare energy usage on your N900. As for me it works quite well, sometimes …