iPad Air manages 24 hours of battery life as LTE hotspot

One of the unsung uses of the iPad is as a personal LTE hotspot. It's rather easy to set up the device as a hotspot for a MacBook if you need to work away from Wi-Fi, although you'll need to keep an eye on your data usage. Last year, Anand Lal Shimpi at Anandtech discovered that an LTE iPad 3 could work as a wireless hotspot for 25.28 hours, downloading data at 50 KB/s. Shimpi repeated his test with the new iPad Air and discovered that even despite having a much smaller battery, the iPad Air can run for 24.08 hours as a hotspot at twice the throughput rate (100 KB/s).

The iPad Air battery is quite a bit smaller due to the slim profile of the device -- it's a 32.4 Wh battery compared with the 42.5 Wh battery built into the third-generation iPad. As Shimpi points out, both the A7 system-on-a-chip and the Qualcomm MDM9615M modem in the iPad Air use a 28nm LP process that sips power.

Shimpi's test was to set the iPad Air up as a personal hotspot, using Wi-Fi tethering to connect it to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. He started the 100 KB/s transfer -- twice the data rate of the earlier test -- and turned the iPad Air's display off. After a day and 8 GB of data transfers, the iPad Air ran out of juice. As Shimpi notes, "you'll likely burn through your monthly data allotment before you run out of power."

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via TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2013/11/04/ipad-air-manages-24-hours-of-battery-life-as-lte-hotspot/