Draining an iPad battery has never been easy. Even before Apple's tablet had a retina display and LTE networking, we marveled at how such a thin package could be such a mobile powerhouse, sipping power as it churned through 10-plus-hours of reading, movie watching, web surfing and bird flinging. When iPad 2 slimmed down the form factor without sacrificing any precious battery power, we were duly impressed.

But now it's getting ridiculous. With the most brilliant, crystal-clear display on any device, ever, and a near-imperceptible increase in thickness--there's just no way that the new iPad can possibly live up to Apple's 10-hours-on-a-single-charge claim, at least not in any real-world situations.

At least that's what I thought when I set out to test it. I was prepared for 8 or 9 hours, which would have been perfectly acceptable, didn't have too much hope I could match--or even approach--Apple's double-digit promise. I certainly wasn't going to make it easy.

When my iPad arrived, I immediately set to draining the battery (I'm still a believer in calibration). It was about 80 percent full out if the box, so it took about a day of setting up my account, restoring my apps from iCloud, arranging my home screens, drooling over the retina-ready apps, showing it off to friends and family, etc. I used it until there was nothing left but a 2048x1,536-pixel image telling me to plug it in.

You might have heard that the new iPad has a larger battery; what you might not know is that all that extra lithium polymer takes quite a while to charge: After about two and a half hours, it was at 50 percent and it didn't top off until five hours and 45 minutes later. So you might want to make a habit of charging your iPad while you sleep.

On to the testing. (A couple of notes: WiFi and Bluetooth were never turned off, and screen brightness was set to auto dim.)

My first task was to watch six consecutive hours of stored movies. (OK, a lot of the time was spent not actually watching the pictures on the screen, despite the awesome triple feature of "Trainspotting," "The Crow," and "Wall-E." By the time Luxo Jr. bounced across the screen for the final closing credits, I had used just 32 percent of my iPad's battery--that's 60 percent of Apple's stated battery limit with nearly 70 percent of the battery life remaining. I was in for a long night.

Next I launched HBO Go and fired up an episode of "Game of Thrones." After 180 minutes of streaming gratuitous sex and glorious violence, I was down to 42% with 9 hours under my belt.

By this point I was probably more tired of semi-watching videos than my iPad was of playing them, so I hit the Music app for two hours of iTunes Match (33 songs downloaded through iCloud). This was strictly a listening experience--I kept the screen dark while I washed dishes and straightened up my apartment--bit when the Smashing Pumpkins were done playing ("The Aeroplane Flies High" box set), my iPad astoundingly still had about 40 percent of its battery remaining.

So I recorded an hour of my son sleeping. Then I took 50 photos of him. Twenty-six percent. Then I went to sleep.

When I woke, I downloaded Sunday's edition of The Daily, read (and watched) it for a half-hour with a cup of coffee, and still couldn't turn the battery icon red (21 percent). Then I downloaded "Steve Jobs" (in iBooks, via previous iCloud purchases) and read chapters 32 and 33.

Now it was at 15 percent, and I was determined to drain it before it drained me (again). Over the next two hours, I played 10 or so levels of Angry Birds, browsed Flipboard and surfed the Web for about 45 minutes, and still had enough battery to check Saturday night's scores on NBA Courtside and MLB At Bat, WindowShop at Amazon, update whatever apps needed updating, peruse my finances with Mint.com, shop for comics and write the first few paragraphs of this article using Pages.

Final tally: 15 hours and 45 minutes of pretty intense usage. Plus 11 hours of standby. Basically, it did more on a single charge than I could. And looked a heck of a lot better doing it.