Tested: Battery Life on the new iPad
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 19, 2012 6:06 PM ESTHot on the heels of our Retina Display analysis we have some more data for you: battery life of the new iPad. The chart above is our revamped web browser battery life test that we introduced in Part 2 of our Eee Pad Transformer Prime review. Despite the huge increase in battery capacity, battery life seems to be a bit lower than the iPad 2. The drop isn't huge but it does echo what we've seen in our subjective testing: the new iPad doesn't appear to last as long as the old one.
The drop on LTE is in line with what Apple claims you should expect: about an hour less than on WiFi.
Now for the killer. If you have an iPad on Verizon's LTE network and use it as a personal hotspot (not currently possible on the AT&T version), it will last you roughly 25.3 hours on a single charge. Obviously that's with the display turned off, but with a 42.5Wh battery driving Qualcomm's MDM9600 you get tons of life out of the new iPad as a personal hotspot.
More in our upcoming review...
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Mordecai Walfish - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
You do not reserve the right to correct a controlled test like this with your subjective experience with whatever settings you have enabled/disabled on your personal iPad.I know you're probably smug as hell now that you have that shiny new iThing in your sweaty little mitts, but try not to be a self-righteous jerk because you think 'everyone else is doing it wrong.' Obviously.
B3an - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
He cant help it, all members of the iCult become iSmug and that then makes them iJerks. I call it the Jobs Effect.KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Another award winning B3an postrpmurray - Monday, March 26, 2012 - link
I agree, he is as dumb as a post.doobydoo - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
I doubt you recreated the web browsing test that Anandtech uses. It's a particularly 'harsh' battery life test which probably explains why you saw better battery life.euler007 - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
"The chart above is our revamped web browser battery life test "Can you imagine what a chart of random anecdotal user's experience would look like.
Maybe you should educate yourself a bit more : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmark_%28computin...
tayb - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
I don't understand these results. Mobile phone battery tests show tremendous drop offs when switching from wifi to LTE yet here have less than one hour. How is that possible? I expected the wifi number to greatly exceed 10 hours. With that humongous battery the wifi number is extremely disappointing.Mordecai Walfish - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
You must take into account the relation this has with the enhanced battery in general. The retina display uses a lot more juice, as well as the new internal hardware components. Only an hour off this battery time would likely equate to quite a bit more for the smaller, old ipad's batteries. (and even more for smaller mobile batteries)dvinnen - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
It's about percentages. Using LTE on a cell phone might be (just making up numbers) 20% of the power draw while on The New Ipad (stupid name) it might be only 5% of the power draw.UpSpin - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
the ipad 2 display consumes 2.7W, the iPad 3 display consumes 7W, the iPhone 4 display consumes 0.42W, actording to displaymate.comSo if the LTE modem consumes an additional 0.5W (that's insane, but makes calculation easier), it maybe halfs battery life on the iPhone, but has only minor influence on the iPad 2 and almost no influence on the iPad 3.