Looks like GCN's concerns that Apple was overstating iPad battery life in face of IPS display power needs reached Apple CEO Steve Jobs while he was sitting in his chair enjoying his 9.7 magical, revolutionary tablet:
I e-mailed him to say that I didn’t mean to imply that he was lying during his iPad presentation, as several people accused me of in their comments. People make presentations written by marketers all the time that are not 100 percent truthful, and it doesn’t make them liars. I used the normal, publicly available e-mail address for him, not any of the special ways we press folks can sometimes get access. I figured that would be the end of it.
Two hours later:
[...]yes, we are getting 10 hours in 1.5 pounds.
Sent from my iPad
Boom.
'Course we get to find out for ourselves when the iPad ships on April 3 in the US.
Reader comments
Steve Jobs Confirms 10hr iPad Battery Life... From his iPad
Surely I am gonna buy iPad.
I'll be happy with 5 or more hours with this thing. And I heard people were crying that 10 hours for ebooks was not enough. Who on gods green earth reads for 10 hours straight? If you do and it's not work related. Get a life.
This is just him saying it again. He shouldve sent a screenshot of the usage screen.
bookmarked. I wonder what brightness was used to achieve the 10 hour mark
William, that's exactly what I was thinking. What settings does he have turned off to allow this. And it's probably on WiFi which gets better battery life anyway.
I'm going to sit this first iPad round out. And get one next year. And steve if your listening. Make sure you add iPad to the iPhone dictionary auto correction. It's a pain in the ass to spell it right myself.
10 hours would be nice, but I'll believe it when somebody outside of Apple runs an iPad through its paces, and, like @William and @Gregg says, breaks it down by usage patterns.
I wish I could write emails to customers like that.
Customer: "Waaah your program sucks can I have it for free since it sucks so much and I've already bought upgrades and have had it for years and you've ruined the new version so can I have it for free I deserve it I'm entitled to it? I'll give you bad ratings on iTunes unless you give me a free version"
Me:
"No."
--Sent from my iPad
Testing, as the username seems persona non grata in the comments...
...but 10 hours is possible, but I'd also love to see it broken down by usage patterns
Dudes, 10 hours is not impossible!! Mobile parts, a huge battery. That would definitely allow for 10 hours of use with a 10" screen. It's really NOT that unbelievable!
cool ... 10 hours...nuclear battery?
Apple.com has a complete breakdown of how the battery tests were conducted. Full details:
"Testing conducted by Apple in January 2010 using preproduction iPad units and software. Testing consisted of full battery discharge while performing each of the following tasks: video playback, audio playback, and Internet browsing using Wi-Fi. Video content was a repeated 2-hour 23-minute movie purchased from the iTunes Store. Audio content was a playlist of 358 unique songs, consisting of a combination of songs imported from CDs using iTunes (128-Kbps AAC encoding) and songs purchased from the iTunes Store (256-Kbps AAC encoding). Internet over Wi-Fi tests were conducted using a closed network and dedicated web and mail servers, browsing snapshot versions of 20 popular web pages, and receiving mail once an hour. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Battery life depends on device settings, usage, and many other factors. Battery tests are conducted using specific iPad units; actual results may vary."
@mystic
"Auto-Brightness were turned off", they have forgotten to say which brightness was the screen
BOOM
10 hours? So much for it being a useful travel companion or eBook. Ever heard of vacations, weekend getaways, or even a plane ride? Forget taking your iPad cuz it'll be dead by the time you get to your destination, and at that point it's nothing more than a paper weight. Unless of course you lug along the cable and power adapter. Oh, and a voltage converter for those international trips.
The short of it is, unless you plan to use it strictly at home and work DOMESTICALLY, this thing is pretty useless (unless you WANT to be the only one in the tablet, PC or smartphone crowd with a cable attached to your device while hanging out at the coffee shop, airport terminal, etc). Flight's delayed? Oh crap, go run around the terminal looking for an outlet.
I have music playing in the background non-stop while I surf, check e-mail, browse the app store, etcetera. For a full 10% drop in battery time, about 37 minutes has passed. So it seems from calculations that in this case the battery life would only be less than 7 hours! It is at full brightness. I hear that using wifi takes an hour off. So, it is understandable that the missing 2-3 hours come from using the iPad at full brightness and non-stop background music playing.