I've been hearing people brag about the iPad's battery life claiming it was "insane." I've heard stories about people claiming to use their iPads for days and still having 40% battery left. They say they're heavy users that do a lot of web browsing and video watching, but I haven't noticed that kind of battery life at all. I've been getting somewhere between 7-9 hours of battery time from the iPad, but after some investigation, I've found that a few things make a huge difference in battery time.

1. Turn Off Push
If you're pushing your email to your iPad, disable push. In my case, I used Microsoft Exchanged to push Gmail to my iPad. I disabled push for the Mail account, but forgot to disable Push for my address book and calendar. Disabling all push features improved my battery life.

2. Turn down the brightness
Just make sure your brightness meter is down at about 1/3 or less.

3. Turn the volume down
It takes a lot of juice to push out the volume. Keep your volume low.

4. Turn off WiFi when not using it
If you're not using WiFi at the moment, disable it.

5. Turn off the iPad at night
Instead of simply putting the iPad to sleep, hold the power button until it asks you if you want to turn it off. Doing so saves battery life.

These five things increased my battery life quite a bit. I am now getting about 10 hours of actual use time out of the iPad. I can read a book for an hour and my battery meter drops about 10%. In my experience the push email was the key. Until I disabled push my battery seemed to drain faster than without push.

Be sure to completely drain, and recharge your iPad at least once per month. Just let a video play until the iPad shuts off, then plug it in and don't use it until it's fully charged. You'll exercise your battery that way and maximize its capacity.