Apple’s iPad is impressive in many ways; having seen its responsiveness in demos and its touted long-life battery claims, I was anxious to get my hands on one for some real-world testing. And my results show battery life that exceeds Apple's claim and quick application performance.
Battery testsApple claims up to 10 hours of battery life when “surfing the web, watching videos, or listening to music.” I connected the iPad to my home’s wireless network and transferred a movie rented from the iTunes store from my MacBook Pro to the iPad. Once the movie was loaded and playing, I unplugged the fully charged iPad and took note of the time.
Four hours and 15 minutes later, I checked the battery level and saw that it had gone down by 30 percent. I checked back every couple of hours to restart the movie, and finally, after a full 11 hours and 25 minutes, the iPad stopped the movie, briefly showed the home screen and then shut down.
Usually, when a company makes a claim of battery life, you expect that claim to be a best-case scenario based on a hard-to-recreate situation that’s nearly impossible to recreate. In this case, it appears that Apple’s claims were conservative, as I was able to exceed the claim by 85 minutes in a power-hungry scenario.
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For comparison’s sake, I ran the same test on the second generation iPod touch (late 2009), which Apple claims is capable of up to 6 hours of video playback. The iPod touch, didn’t fare as well, playing the movie for just 4 hours and 53 minutes before shutting down.
I also timed how long it took to recharge the iPad. It took just shy of 4 hours to fully recharge the iPad under the optimal conditions - sleeping and plugged into its 10W power charger.
Macworld (US) senior editor Christopher Breen, in his article that looks at the iPad as a iPod, tested the iPad battery life when playing audio only. When he wrote his article, the iPad had run for over 43 hours and still had 71 per cent of battery life left.
