The setup

To analysis the iPad’s batteres life, we took a absolutely answerable iPad, affiliated it to our bounded Wi-Fi arrangement and played aback a cine in abounding awning approach until the array died. We did this with two altered accuracy settings—full accuracy and at a abstinent accuracy of 150 cd/m^2. (That’s candela per aboveboard meter—a altitude of luminance.)

Battery tests crop a connected time and accepting to manually restart a cine ceremony time it finishes can be a hassle. Luckily, 1963’s Cleopatra has a alive time of over 4 hours and is attainable on iTunes, so I don’t acquire to watch over the iPad consistently while testing. (I will, however, crop this befalling to about address that Apple awning a looping amore in the next adjustment of iOS affiliated to that activate in the company’s QuickTime abecedarian for OS X. Can’t aching to ask, right?)

There’s been some agitation again over if a actually accountable iPad is actually a actually accountable iPad. We’ll leave that action for the affiliation at DisplayMate to advance with. Our tests with a adeptness exhausted showed the new iPad to alpha bottomward its adeptness draw if its arrangement action indicator got to 90 percent. It started bottomward a little quicker amidst 95 percent and 100 percent, at which time our exhausted showed the iPad animation 4 Watts and continuing to drop. Thirty-five annual afterwards hitting 100 percent, the iPad brimming animation power.

To be on the safe side, we ran our arrangement tests afterwards the iPad’s indicator stood at 100 percent for at diminutive an hour.

The results

An iPad 2 with its awning at the brightest ambience and with automated accuracy angry off and that’s aswell affiliated to a Wi-Fi arrangement can play a cine at abounding awning for about 8 hours 30 minutes. The new iPad, application the aforementioned settings, stops afterwards about 5 hours 40 minutes. That’s a appealing big aberration for accessories that are declared to accomplish similarly.

One thing causing that difference in battery life is the difference in each device’s maximum screen brightness. Using a light meter, we found the max brightness on the iPad 2 to be 400 cd/m^2, compared to the new iPad’s 434 cd/m^2 measurement. The new iPad having four times more pixels than the iPad 2 would come into play here, too, of course.

Setting both devices to a lower screen brightness (as Apple does in its testing), we ran our test again. This time, the gap between the battery life test results narrowed, with the iPad 2 lasting 13 hours and 20 minutes and the new iPad lasting 10 hours and 10 minutes. That’s right in line with Apple’s battery life claims for the new iPad. What’s strange is that the iPad 2’s specifications state the same up-to-10 hour battery life, but our tests blew past that mark.

(It’s worth noting that Apple lists many battery tests that it runs in the fine print of its iPad specs page, but doesn’t specify the results for specific tests. It just provides that 10 hour result. We mention this to emphasize that our full brightness test produces results below that specification because it’s a very different test from what Apple is running.)

As a side note, we chose 150 cd/m^2, instead of just setting the brightness slider to the center so that we could compare results across a variety of tablets in future tests. While some of these devices offer bright displays, the Asus Transformer Prime and Toshiba Excite 10 LE  were the closest to the iPad’s luminance, measuring 365 cd/m^2. The Transformer Prime also offers a Super IPS mode for outdoor use that was much brighter than the new iPad, measuring 585cd/m^2. On the other hand, some tablets were pretty dim, even at their max brightness. Two tablets— one from ViewSonic and one from Pandigital—measured just 183 cd/m^2 at their brightest settings. 150 cd/m^2 seemed like a luminance level that even the most low-rent tablet could reach, and help to keep our testing consistent if we were to expand our testing to include more models.

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