I know battery issues with N95 & N95 8GB handsets have been done to death in the blogosphere but having searched about I was still sure my N95 8GB battery life wasn’t up to scratch. My daily use after a full charge:

1. Every other day I download a podcast (20MB tops) over Wifi
2. I use my music player (in offline mode) each morning for around 30 mins
3. Each day I send about 5 texts (if that)
4. I make 5-10 mins of calls
5. I browse 5 mins (tops) on the net
6. I turn the phone off for around an hour in the middle of the day whilst I drive
7. I don’t have any app running in the background.
8. Handy Weather updates every 8 hours for 2 cities over GPRS
9. Bluetooth is not on, nor is wireless scanning.
10. I am usually in either a full 5 bar 3G signal or full GPRS signal area.

My battery was always depleted before I get chance to turn the phone off in the evening. A few posts on various forums and it turned out this just wasn’t normal and I was directed to install Nokia Power Profiler, a handy little app that tells you how much power your device is using at any given time. Running it on my handset in standby gave a reading of 0.31w. I had been told anything higher than 0.15-0.18 during standby was ‘unusual’. Tried re-flashing firmware but it didn’t change.

Then I stumbled on this post and thought about the fact that my N95 8GB was in a silicon case.

Long story short, the silicon case was pushing the camera button of the N95 8GB in constantly – creating a constant drain on the battery. One swift operation with a stanley knife and the offending piece of silicon is no more and my battery drain is a mere fraction of the previous levels (0.09 – 0.13).

Bottom line – if you have shoddy battery life and your device is in a tight case – try testing power usage without it. The case could be the problem…