Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 w/ Verizon 4G LTE Tablet Review

Galaxy Tab 10.1 Battery Life

Battery life is very important on tablets and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 4G LTE uses a Lithium Ion Polymer battery that is rated as being 7000 mAh. Samsung rates the battery life on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 at up to 9 hours
on a single battery charge for video watching or up to 72 hours for
music.

We wanted to test out the battery on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, but we did so using our own methods. When we travel we use our tablet PC to watch movies. Most of the time when we are on a plane or stuck in a car on a road trip it is during the day and you have to crank up the screen brightness in order to be able to see anything. We increased the screen brightness to 100% and left Wi-Fi enabled as with inflight internet and smartphone teethering being more adopted we felt that was the best way to test tablets for our readers. Some sites turn off Wi-Fi and lower the screen brightness, but we don’t feel that is something most people do in the real world.

We wanted to put a full length movie on our tablet, so we turned to Slysoft for a solution. We were able to use AnyDVD HD and CloneDVD mobile to ‘backup’ our store bought DVD movie on our laptop. For this review we used the movie ‘Something Borrowed‘.

We converted the movie from MPEG2 to MP4 at a video bitrate of ~2500 kbps. We then transferred the file to the tablets with the included USB data cables. We then played the movie with the built-in gallery player until the each tablet shut down when the battery died.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 lasted for 6 hours and eight minutes, which is enough time to watch ~3 movies depending on how long they are! The ASUS Transformer TF101 lasted 5 minutes longer and then the Motorola Xoom made it more than a half an hour longer than both. The battery life between these three tablets is very similar on our movie watching test.

Once your tablet PC battery dies you want to get it fully recharged as soon as possible, so we timed how long it takes to get the tablet back to a fully charged status indicator. The Motorola Xoom was able to fully recharge in just over 2.5 hours, the ASUS Transformer took just shy of three hours to recharge and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 took nearly 4.5 hours to fully recharge!

It should be noted that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 will use more battery when connecting to the LTE network. Our testing for just general use showed the tablet would last around 9 hours on Wi-Fi or 8 hours on LTE with simple web browsing and e-mail use. You can still get roughly 8 hours out of the tablet with normal daily use though, which is great.