The iPad as a Personal Hotspot: Over 25 Hours of Continuous Use

Verizon makes the decision of which iPad to buy even more difficult by being the only of the two US carriers to enable the personal hotspot option on the new iPad. For no additional monthly fee on top of your data plan your Verizon LTE iPad can act as a wireless hotspot, allowing up to five other devices to use its cellular connection over WiFi (2.4GHz only, unfortunately) or Bluetooth. One device can use the hotspot via the iPad's USB dock cable.

If you don't already have the personal hotspot option in the initial settings page, you'll need to go to general settings, then network, and activate personal hotspot there. Once you've done so you'll see a new item for personal hotspot in the default settings page.

You must remain on the personal hotspot settings page for the iPad's SSID to be visible to nearby devices. Once you leave the settings page, the iPad stops broadcasting its personal hotspot SSID.

In general the iPad's personal hotspot seems to be better behaved than similar options under Android. I've noticed all too often that Android hotspots will either stop routing traffic after an extended period of use, requiring either cycling the radio states on the hotspot device itself or in some cases a full reset of the hardware. The iPad wasn't immune to this sort of behavior, it just seemed to happen less than on the Android tablets and smartphones that I've tested. In one test it took only a few hours before I had to reset the iPad to make its hotspot work properly again, while in another case it was only after 24 hours of continuous use that the feature began misbehaving. Overall I am very pleased with the Verizon iPad as a personal hotspot, the bigger issue is the cost of the data that you're sharing with all of those devices.

As I mentioned in our Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTE review, these LTE tablets make great hotspots simply because you are pairing smartphone modems with gigantic (for a smartphone) batteries. The end result is if you have to treat your LTE tablet as a true hotspot (screen off and all), you get great battery life. The new iPad takes this idea to a completely new level since its battery is now squarely in the laptop-sized category, but its LTE modem is still designed to run on a < 6Wh smartphone battery.

Our standard hotspot battery life test involves running four copies of our web browsing battery life test and playing a 128Kbps internet radio stream on a laptop tethered via WiFi to the hotspot being tested. While peak download speeds during this test can reach as high as 1MB/s, remember that these web browsing battery life scripts include significant idle time to simulate reading a web page. The average data transferred over the duration of the test amounts to around 25KB/s if you take into account idle periods.

With the Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTE I tried something different—letting the tethered notebook download at full speed using the Tab's LTE connection. On the new iPad, after nearly an hour of downloads at well over 1MB/s I saw no drop in the battery percentage indicator—it was stuck at 100%. Not wanting to upset Verizon too much, I needed to find a good balance between a realistic workload and something that wasn't going to make me rack up over a hundred GB in overages.

If our standard hotspot test averages around 25KB/s of transfers, I figured doubling it couldn't hurt. I downloaded a sufficiently large file at a constant 50KB/s on a laptop tethered over WiFi to the new iPad to see how long it would last. The result was astounding: 25.3 hours on a single charge

WiFi Hotspot Battery Life Time

I used up over 4.5GB during this period—almost the entire amount that my $50/month plan gave me, all without having to plug the iPad in to recharge it. That's the beauty of using a 42.5Wh battery to drive a cellular modem that can last a couple of hours on a tenth of that capacity. If you want to use the new iPad as a personal hotspot, you'll likely run out of data before you run out of battery life.

It's a real shame that AT&T decided against enabling personal hotspot on its version of the LTE iPad. It's for this reason alone that I'd recommend the Verizon version, assuming that you're planning on using your iPad in an area where Verizon has LTE coverage of course.

The Most Tangible Feature: LTE Support The Camera, It's Much Improved
Comments Locked

234 Comments

View All Comments

  • Riseofthefootclan - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    I entered the tablet market this year in hopes of enhancing my school experience. I was looking for a device that would do the following: reading textbooks, slides, notes, watching video etc.

    I too looked at the kindle, but I will tell you now that for what you want I'd avoid it.

    I first purchased a Samsung galaxy tab 10.1 LTE. I wanted Internet every where I went, but soon became frustrated with the android operating system (inconsistently chunky etc).

    After playing with an iPad 2 in the store, I realized it was a much better experience. Fluid and problem free.

    A month later the iPad 3 (new iPad) is released. After playing with it I realized how much better the screen was, and how much that impacted the experience (especially for someone who primarily uses the device for text consumption).

    So now, here I sit, with a 32b LTE iPad 3. I don't regret the purchase one bit. Armed with the Bluetooth keyboard, or just the on screen variant, I can also take notes quite competently (wrote this entire thing out with the on screen keyboard).

    Best educational tool I have ever purchased. In my hands I can carry my one stop shop for web browsing, email, textbooks, fictional books, course materials, lectures and even games.

    Coming from an iPad 2, I'd go so far as to say it was well worth the upgrade.

    I highly recommend picking one of these up, as I believe it will fit your bill of requirements to a tee.
  • adityarjun - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    Thanks dude! And all others who replied. I guess I will be picking up a 32gb LTE version of the ipad.
    Do you guys know whether the ipad has international warranty? If I were to buy it from the US and import it here, would I have warranty?
    And how many years of warranty does it have? Is it a replacement warranty, i.e. , if anything is broken they give a new ipad or a normal warranty?
    This is another aspect the review didnt cover. A para detailing the warranty and tech support should have been there imo.
  • adityarjun - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    Oops forgot to add this in the comment above-- which keyboard are you using.. I think I will pick the Logitech one.
    And any good stylus?
    Also, for protection I guess I will go with a Zagg shield and the smart cover. Will that be enough?
  • OCedHrt - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    How come the review starts with the 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 Super IPS+ tablet but all the comparisons are with the 1280 x 800 tablet?
  • adityarjun - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    I am not sure but I dont think that those tablets are in the market yet. That was just a comparison of specs. Later on we had a comparison with other major tablets available in the market currently.i.e ipad 2 and the transformer prime.
  • OCedHrt - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    Says 40 nm on page 2 and 45 nm on page 6.
  • g1011999 - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    At Page (The A5X SoC) / Table (ARM Cortex A9 Based SoC Comparison)

    The cell for "A5X" and "Memory Interface to the CPU" shall be "Quad channel(128bit)"
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    Actually that's correct as it stands. The memory interface to the CPU is 64bit on the A5X. The other two memory channels go to the GPU, rather than the CPU.
  • g1011999 - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link

    No, Those memory controllers are multi-port AXI controller which are connected to L2 cache controller, system fabrics, GPU.

    L2 cache controller is connected to all those 128bit dram controller, either through direct connection (memory adapter like omap 4470) or through system AXI bus, so the cpu can access all the memory.

    The A5X is a SoC coupled with 128bit quad channel DRAM regardless whether the bandwidth from CPU(L2 cache) to memory is sufficient or not.

    The IPs ( CPU, video codec, display controller, GPU, CAM-IF ...) on SoC can take advantage from the 128bit memory interface with less chance of congestion.
  • PeteH - Friday, March 30, 2012 - link

    And how do you know the internal system bus is AXI?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now