Apple's iPad - The AnandTech Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on April 7, 2010 9:39 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mac
- Apple
- iPad
- Mobile
Honest Apple: Battery Life
I mentioned this in my iPhone 3GS review and I believe it bares repeating: Apple's battery life estimates have been ridiculously accurate over the past couple of years. I swear Apple must have my office bugged because my battery life numbers almost always equal theirs and they have no access to my test files.
To test battery life on the iPad I ran a modified version of the process I use for smartphones. I use the WiFi connection to browse a series of 20 web pages varying in size, spending 20 seconds on each page (I timed how long it takes me to read a page on Digg and came up with 36 seconds; I standardized on 20 seconds for the test to make things a little more stressful). The test continues to loop until the battery dies. This test is designed to simulate a relatively heavy, but realistic data load on the phone. We're stressing the WiFi radio, SoC, memory and display subsystems here. This should also be the sort of battery life you get when you are using any apps that use data (but not 3D acceleration). The display brightness was set to 50% on the iPad.
That's the test I use for smartphones, but to make it a little more stressful on the iPad I continuously played music using the iPod app, one of the only apps that's allowed to run in the background. I also told the mail app to automatically check my AnandTech email account every 15 minutes. I get a good amount of mail so this constant checking would add another realistic component to the workload. I also ran this same test on ASUS Eee PC 1001P:
The iPad came in just shy of Apple's 10 hour claim. At 9 hours and 45 minutes, it's long enough to get you through the greater part of a day. But calling Apple's battery estimates conservative is misleading. A single charge won't last you all day.
The iPad does last longer than ASUS' 1001P, however ASUS tells us that the 1005PE will buy you another 2 hours of battery life for an extra $79.
What about watching movies? Our resident smartphone expert Brian Klug put together a 6 hour loop of The Bourne Ultimatum. This was from a 1080p source but re-encoded using Handbrake's Normal profile resulting in a 1.3GB 720p rip that was looped three times.
I imported the movie into iTunes, synced it to the iPad and looped the already 6 hour loop until the iPad died. Display brightness was set to 50%, auto brightness control was disabled, automatic email downloading was also disabled.
Video playback is actually a fairly light use case. In these SoCs there's usually a dedicated video decode block, most likely the PowerVR VXD (same as in the iPhone 3GS). This block decodes each frame and sends it to the display output engine. The only things working in this case are parts of the CPU, the video decode engine, memory bus and the display engine. There's no 3D rendering and the vast majority of the CPU is idle. With this in mind, it's no surprise that the iPad can last 13.6 hours when playing back a 720p H.264 movie.
| Apple iPhone 3GS | Apple iPad | ASUS Eee PC 1001P | |
| H.264 Video Playback | 9.5 hours | 13.6 hours | 5.3 hours |
The iPhone 3GS however can almost hit 10 hours performing the same test. This gives you an idea of how much power the display is consuming on the iPad. The netbook doesn't stand a chance by comparison. The iPad was made for watching lots of movies on a single battery charge.
My final battery life test was a 3D gaming benchmark. I ran Real Racing HD on the iPad (and Real Racing on the iPhone) until the devices died. The cellular network was turned off on the iPhone 3GS and brightness was set to 50%.
Anything GPU intensive is going to be the worst case scenario for these SoCs. Here we’re stressing the CPU, GPU and memory subsystem. The added load is reflected in the battery life numbers:
| Apple iPhone 3GS | Apple iPad | |
| 3D Gaming | 3.9 hours | 8.8 hours |
The iPhone 3GS approaches 4 hours, while the iPad manages almost 9 hours while gaming. I’d also consider this to be a best case scenario gaming benchmark. A more intense 3D game could easily drop these numbers even further.
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strikeback03 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
My carputer runs fine with temps in the car over 100*F.Mumrik - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Man! You guys must really have been in a hurry to get this review up.It is long, critical and thorough as I expect from you, but there are quite a lot of grammatical errors and you repeat yourself a lot i places. :-D
Sunburn74 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Anand,When you read the rhetoric between the gtx 470/480 reviews, your most recent Macbook pro reviews, and your current iPad review, its clear the latter is by far the single largest fluff piece ever posted on this site. You seem to have forgotten that people come to your site for one reason. We are the unknowing consumers who turn to your impartial judgement with one, and only one question: should we buy it?
Ryan Smith's gtx 470/480 review was superb. He didn't write "I could see myself buying a $500 gtx 480 for my 4th PC on summer trips to my house in the hamptons where I don't have to be using my real desktop for any real work". He flat out said "Nvidia was too little, too late". He didn't try to sell anyone on what might possibly be on some distant horizon in the upcoming future if you had the extra money; he delineates whether or not people should buy the item right now.
When future potential arrives, then you write another article explaining how the landscape has changed. Anand, your latest article shamelessly bent over backwards to positively sell the iPad in this way. How about comparing the ipad to the ipod touch, the iphone, the blackberry, the android, and explaining if people who own these items that deeply saturate our society what the iPad means to them? How about answering the bottom line question of if I should go buy one right now or if I should wait? How about any statement, however remote it is, on what sort of competition the ipad will face and what that means to the consumer? Who are you serving here? The people? Apple? Or your personal beliefs towards tablet PCs as something you simply want to succeed despite obviously being in infancy?
Anand, don't lose that journalistic sense of justice that requires you tell your readers what they need to know, not how you might use the item if you had extra money for a vacation to australia.
vol7ron - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
A couple of annoyances in the past with the iPhone 3g (aside form no-Flash) has been (1) it's lingering keyboard, (2) safari drop down menu assistance, and (3) delayed shortcuts1:
An example of the lingering keyboard is when texting someone else. There is no way to hide/autohide the keyboard once it's open. For the text messaging you can go into "edit" mode or simply go back to "messages" page and then back to the text, but why make it hard? I know my IRC apps make it easy to hide the keyboard, by just touching the screen again, why can't Apple just add a button?
2:
While the scrollable, assisted, drop-down menu in Safari is neat, those long-texted options are inadequate. Especially for cases that start off with the same sentence; for instance:
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from the web}
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from a friend}
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from work}
-- basically, you can't see the off-screen stuff until selected. I don't understand that since Apple has made a zoomable, fluid, paging device.
3:
While certain shortcuts would be effective on the iPhone, I think it's the response time that's lacking. For instance, the touch-and-hold period button has a popup option that allows you to select the ellipsis (tri-dot). That would be effective if the popup was more instantaneous - instead, it's faster to type out 3 periods. It's these menus that I hope are still prevalent in the iPad keyboard, but have a better response time.
vol7ron
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PS: loved the review. I am thinking about getting an iPad now - as stated before, I will have to wait for a price drop. $500-1000 is not acceptable, especially given the amount of storage. I'd love to see this device price range reduced to around $250-500 (perhaps hopeful future thinking).
Locut0s - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Looks like it. Nice if so!CSMR - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
We are seeing that limited devices (iPhone, Windows Phone 7, iPad) have an appeal to many consumers, who just want to do a small and finite number of things with them. This type of device can be stylish and effective.But I think Anandtech and other tech sites should have a prejudice in favor of computers rather than locked down devices. Limited devices can be cool, and I'm not saying AnandTech shouldn't review them, but it should prefer systems that are not limited.
Rather than going along with the average consumer tech sites could show the market how to make unlimited systems (tablets running Win7, phones running OSes like android, windows mobile) better designed and more intuitive, and show users how to use these effectively.
The current proliferation of locked-down devices has some strengths but it is a threat to computing. We've been fortunate that computers have been so popular. What if most people no longer use computers, but devices, and the market caters to them? What if the computer market becomes like the console market? What will advanced users do?
Impulses - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
Anand mentions that the iPad keeps performance decent by relying on solid state memory and a lightweight OS.... I'd like to see those iPad vs. netbook tests re-run against a netbook w/a SSD... I mean, a decent netbook plus a 40GB Intel X25-V is still cheaper than an iPad. ;)I realize that a $120 drive upgrade to a $300 computer isn't something the average consumer does, but it's pretty common amongst us geeks. /shrug Plus we've seen the X25-V as low as $99 (or $75 for the Kingston version). My X25-V gave my Acer Aspire One a nice kick in the pants, sure it doesn't make it play Flash video any better but it significantly improved multi-tasking, app loading, and hibernation.
A CULV laptop + a decent SSD wouldn't be much more expensive than some of the iPads after you factor in some of the options (stand, apps, 3G, higher capacities, etc). I realize they're not the same type of device, just trying to speak purely to the performance side of the argument here...
Impulses - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I wasn't quite done reading the article when I wrote that last post... The battery life numbers for the iPad are pretty impressive, heck even the 3GS numbers seem impressive compared to my 2nd gen iPod touch. I don't know if Plants vs Zombies is just poorly optimized, or if the reduced processing capabilities of my touch drain the battery faster, but I'm lucky if I can get more than two hours of the thing with that game. It just rapes the battery life...I guess one reason Apple might've skipped out on Moorestown would be battery life considerations, 'specially when playing back media... The degree to which many games seem to drain smartphone batteries these days makes me wonder why we even bother though, I can't possibly consider gaming on my smartphone if it means the battery's not gonna last me thru the day because of it... Despite the fact that this one of the few things I do like about the direction Apple has taken the iPhone OS in (the gaming environment/potential).
Mr Alpha - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I can of the top of my head think of two reasons why the iBooks app isn't installed by default.1. The iBookstore is US only, and the iPad is international. This means they would either have to ship the iPad with an app people can't use or have two sets of firmware, one for US and another one for the rest of the world.
2. The developer license agreement states that you can't duplicate functionality. So if they had included the iBooks app by default they would have had to either kick all other ereader apps and catch hell for it, or ignore it and come of a hypocritical while undermining their own license agreement.
dagamer34 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
The iBooks app does not come with the firmware of the iPad, it is a downloadable app like Remote and iDisk.