| Rath said: How does that drop in battery life compare to when watching a video for example? You could be right, I don't own a tablet and was just basing my opinion on my experiences with my laptop's battery life. |
As long as it's h264, video has very low impact on power. Unlike most PCs, these devices use special accelerators to decode h264 very efficently rather than burden the general-purpose CPU, so you can expect to see around 10% or so of your battery drain per hour. Add a little if the video is streaming and subtract more if you drop the brightness.
For example, if I watch an hour of Netflix stream before I go to sleep, I lose 8% of my battery because all my lights are off and I drop the backlight right down. I'd guess the same stream at medium brightness would consume about the same juice as Infinity Blade 2. It would save power on the CPU/GPU and spend it on wifi instead.
Here's the thing, the A5 in the iPad 2 is the same CPU as the iPhone 4S, but clocked 25% higher, so it's going to chew through power about 25% faster (probably a little more). But the battery in the iPad 2 is 400% larger than the iPhone 4S. While Infinity Blade might burn down your phone battery in 4 hours, the tablet has way more battery to shoulder that load. The iPad 3 has another 70% more battery to light all those pixels, so presumably it's going to care even less how much load is on the CPU.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
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