The iPad looks amazingly responsive in Apple's product demos, and the company's claims for its battery life are also impressive. But how does it perform in the real world? We've had a go on the iPad in our labs and we're happy to report that the battery actually performed beyond Apple's claims. The iPad's speed is also awesome, even relative to the iPhone 3GS.
Battery life
Apple claims up to 10 hours of battery life when "surfing the
web, watching videos, or listening to music". We connected the iPad to ourwireless network and transferred a movie rented from the iTunes Store from a MacBook Pro to the iPad. Once the movie was loaded and playing, we unplugged the fully charged iPad and took note of the time.
Four hours and 15 minutes later, the battery level had gone down by 30 percent. We restarted the movie every couple of hours, AFtera Full 11 hours and 25 minutes, the IPad finally stopped playing the movie, displayed the home screen briefly and then shut down.
Estimates of battery life often use a best-case scenario. Our test demanded plenty of power, and yet it appears that Apple's claims were conservative, as we saw the iPad beat Apple's figure by 85 minutes.
We ran the same test on the second generation iPod touch {late 2009), which Apple claims can offer up to 6 hours oF video playback. The iPod touch played the movie for just 4 hours and 53 minutes before shutting down.
We also timed how long it took to recharge the iPad Fully. It took just shy oF 4 hours under optimal conditions-with the iPad sleeping and plugged into its 10W charger.
We have to confess we gave up trying to determine an exact battery life when using the iPad purely for music, like an iPod. After playing audio non-stop for over 43 hours, the iPad still had 71 percent oF battery capacity left.
Peggie power The iPad was fastest at launching this popular game
Application performance
To find out how the iPad's performance compares to other devices running the iPhone OS, we tested it against various versions of the iPod touch and iPhone. We updated the iPod touch 64GB to iPhone OS 3.1.3, the most recent release, and loaded the necessary apps onto the iPad, In four of the six tests, the iPad was the fastest device, with the latest iPod touch and the iPhone 3GS taking First place in one test each.
The biggest speed difference was in webpage loading. To load nytimes. com, the IPad took 11.1 seconds-just less than half the time taken by its closest competitor, the iPhone 3GS, which took 22.8 seconds. The iPod touch came in third, though it was fastest at starting up.
The IPad was impressively faster than the IPod touch in two of the app launch tests, taking 29 per cent less time to launch Peggie and 27 per cent less time to load Star Defense than its nearest rivals. The iPhone 3GS was fastest at loading PCalc Lite but quite a bit slower than the IPad when launching Peggie, It fared better in our Star DeFense launch test, taking 20.6 seconds, in between the iPod's and iPad's results.
The IPad also impressed by taking 10.1 seconds to complete the WebKit Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in the SaFari browser, which is a third less time than required by the iPod touch and iPhone 3GS.
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