UK consumer group Which? has crowned Apple’s iPad Air as the best tablet for battery life, beating out rivals Samsung, Amazon and Google.
Which? put the iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina Display and iPad 2 up against the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, Google Nexus 7 and others to see which fared best when the battery was tested browsing the web and watching video.
As can be seen above, their research found that Apple’s iPad Air outclasses the competition in terms of battery life with the Retina iPad mini and iPad 2 doing pretty well too:
The iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display and iPad 2 all performed better than the Android alternatives for web browsing. On a full tank, Apple’s iPad Air will last for 658 minutes of web-browsing – beating the 483 minutes offered by the longest-lasting Android tablet we tested, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition). Likewise, the iPad mini with Retina display features an impressive 614 minutes of internet usage, while Apple’s three year old iPad 2 managed a sterling 590 minutes.
Of course, no one uses their tablet just to check the football scores. With TV streaming services like BBC iPlayer and Netflix proving phenomenally popular, how much video a device can play in one charge is hugely important.
The iPad Air proved victorious in this test as well, offering 777 minutes of battery life – that’s enough to watch the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy in one sitting. Apple didn’t achieve quite the same dominance in this testing category however, with Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 (714 minutes) finishing in second place and the Google Nexus 7 (669 minutes) mustering third position.
Not only is the iPad Air achieving better results than the competition, the Which? test shows that the device is capable of achieving more than the 10 hours Apple states.
Of course, the battery life of a tablet depends entirely on how it is being used and may differ from person to person. However, tests like these help to illustrate how well devices perform under certain use cases and give an indication of how well they fare when compared to competing products.
