When used as a personal hotspot only over Verizon’s 4G cellular connection, the new iPad gets more than 25 hours of run time, AnandTech found out in their battery life testing published this morning. This is better than your average MiFi device by at least a factor of five. Matter of fact, it gets exactly an hour less in hotspotting tests compared to WiFi benchmarks, which falls in line with Apple’s official specs.
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime beats Apple’s third-generation tablet when hotspotting in Normal, Balanced and Power Saving profiles. With that in mind, the ability to use your iPad as a personal Verizon hotspot for more than 25 hours is certainly welcome news in a string of negative reports alleging issues with the tablet’s much-improved 42.5Wh battery.
Author Anand Lal Shimpi writes:
If you have an iPad on Verizon’s LTE network and use it as a personal hotspot (not currently possible on the AT&T version), it will last you roughly 25.3 hours on a single charge. Obviously that’s with the display turned off, but with a 42.5Wh battery driving Qualcomm’s MDM9600 you get tons of life out of the new iPad as a personal hotspot.
If you’re one of the fans concerned about the iPad’s battery woes and appreciate AnandTech’s exhaustive technical reviews, you should also check out their analysis of the Retina Display on the new iPad.
As for Heatgate and the emerging Batterygate, let it be known that not everyone agrees with screaming headlines depicting the device running burning hot in one’s hands.
Image courtesy of iFixit
Sure, it gets warmer when you crank up the brightness level to 100 percent, but people are finding in their own tests that it runs cooler than some Android tablets (as always, not everyone agrees).
More on this in the below chart, courtesy of PCWorld.
If  you’re really eager to get to the bottom of this overcharging thing, I suggest a nice article by MacWorld UK that lays out everything you need to know about charging your iOS devices. Apple also has nice resources on the subject on their website.
It is my hope that we all can soon put this so-called scandal behind us and move on. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I definitely get this feeling that ever since the so-called Antennagate scandal erupted – and it was an issue, no question about it – bloodthirsty media is adamant to make teething problems with new Apple products look bigger than they really are.
Jonathan Mann put it best in the iPhone Antenna Song:
The media loves a failure
In a string of success
The facts won’t ever matter
If they can make bigger messes.
I think that pretty much nails it, wouldn’t you agree?