I’m extremely happy that Apple is picking battery life over thickness and weight. It shows that they have their priorities straight: battery life is by far the best features of the iPad’s hardware. As long as the weight and size don’t get too crazy (and they are still doing better than the first iPad) picking battery life is always the right choice.

It's still slightly lighter than the first iPad, so for those of us who didn't upgrade, it'll be an improvement. :)

Heh, yes, by 5%. :)

I think a nice weight would be about 400g. The Kindles are 200-300g, except the DX-2 which is 540g.

I prefer my Nook Toucho the iPad for pure text reading because it is so ridiculously light. But it would be tough to make the iPad 3 lighter than it is, without major breakthroughs in batteries or materials (lighter gorilla glass).

Pushing 4x as many pixels doesn't come cheap. You have to add bigger batteries.

I'm really curious to see what the battery is like when playing games. Quadrupling the effective required fill rate is gonna have that GPU working overtime.

I think I would have been satisfied with a 4.5 hour battery life claim, if it was lighter than the iPad 2.

I guess we're left waiting for a big breakthrough in battery technology to see a decrease in the weight of these types of devices.

The new model has almost twice the battery capacity, and the battery probably accounts for almost all the weight, so it looks like there is a decent amount of yearly improvement.

Twice the battery capacity, but still rated at 10 hours. That new display must really drink the juice.

That's too bad. I held off on the original iPad because it felt too bulky and heavy. The second one was significantly thinner and lighter, so I bought one and have been using the hell out of it for the past year.