Jobs Claims That Flash Would Kill iPad Battery Life – Like We Bought 10 Hours To Begin With

Ask yourself honestly, did you really expect to ever get ten hours of battery life in normal use from your (forthcoming) iPad?

I thought not. Not one device that I have ever bought (Apple or not) has lived up to its battery life claim. That said, when Steve Jobs got in front of the tech world and claimed ten hours, I assumed seven would be a fair estimate.

Jobs keeps using the ten-hour number, most recently in claiming that if the iPad could render flash, its battery life would collapse from ten hours, to 1.5 hours.

Now he is stretching the truth (a polite way to say that he his deliberately misguiding), in both directions. But don’t just take my word for it, listen to the gadget gods over at Gizmodo. They say that “You’d lose battery life, sure, the same way you lose battery life watching any type of video on any system, but nothing near as dramatic as 85%.” Of course, 85% is the percentage drop from ten hours, to 1.5 hours.

That about sums it up. Not only is Flash not something to be laughed at, as Steve has done repeatedly (both vocally and nonverbally by not including it), but it is something that at the moment is crucial to the way that the web works. HTML5 will be better, but it is not yet, and it will not be for some time.

Really Mr. Jobs, hype is one thing, but this is just a bit much.