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Part of the iPad's appeal is its long battery life. Apple claims 10 hours for the wifi version and 9 hours for the 3G iPad, both of which are pretty impressive.
Of course the real world is considerably different than battery stress tests. Watch movies continuously at full brightness with push e-mail notifications for a dozen accounts going in the background and you aren't going to get even 8 hours out of the iPad.
But in our experience is possible to get close to Apple's claims, provided you're willing to turn off a few features and dim your screen a bit.
Here's our guide to making your iPad battery last a bit longer
== The obvious ==
# Lock your iPad when you aren't using it -- Sure it will auto-lock after a set period of time, but why leave it sitting there wasting battery when it's so simple to lock? While you're at it, shorten the auto-lock settings; head to Settings > General > Auto-Lock and set the interval to a shorter time.
# Dim the screen -- This is probably the biggest single thing you can do to save battery life. By default, the iPad has its Auto-Brightness feature turned on which means screen adjusts to the ambient lighting around you. That's nice, but in low light situations that means the screen is battery draining bright. Head to Settings > Brightness & Wallpaper and adjust the brightness down a bit.
# Ditch the case -- Some cases can cause the iPad to become quite warm which decreases battery life.
== Features worth disabling ==
# Turn off 3G -- Whenever you're on wifi, turn off the 3G network if you have an iPad that support 3G.
# Turn off wifi -- Although it severely limits the usefulness of your iPad, if you're just watching a movie anyway, turn off the wifi and make the battery last a bit longer.
# Disable Bluetooth -- like the other forms of network Bluetooth drains the battery. Assuming you aren't using any peripherals that need it, turn it off.
# Learn to Love Airplane Mode -- The easiest way to temporarily disable all forms of networking is to switch into Airplane Mode when you don't need to connect, say when you're watching a movie or working on a document.
# Watch your apps -- There are two types of apps that are particularly hard on your iPad's batteries -- games that never let the screen dim and location based services that constantly check your geo whereabouts. Make sure to shutdown such apps when you're not using them
# Disable Push notification -- The built-in Mail app as well as dozens of other apps poll servers in the background look for new tweets, mail and messages, all of which costs your precious battery life. Open Settings and select Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then select Fetch New Data and turn off Push.
# Delay data fetching -- So you've turned off push notifications, go a step further and make Mail and other apps check-in with the server less frequently. To increase the fetch interval, go to Settings and select Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then select Fetch New Data and tap Hourly. Note that this is a global setting add applies to all apps. It's also worth noting that setting Fetch New Data to hourly means you can't find your iPad using the MobileMe Find My iPad tools.
== Extending the life of the battery ==
While all of the above will help your battery last a bit longer, none of it extends the life of the battery. For that Apple [http://www.apple.com/batteries/ipad.html recommends "cycling" your iPad battery once a month], which means charging it all the way up and then running it all the way down.
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