It’s nowhere near as glamorous as a retina display or AirPlay Mirroring, but incredible battery life is still one of the iPad’s great features.

I’ve had a perfect reminder of that over the last week or so. I bought a new iPad 3 as a dedicated testing device 8 days ago. I have not charged at all since buying it and beginning to use it last Monday (May 21).  It’s sitting on my desk now at 24% charge.

Admittedly it has had some days of little or no use; but it has also had a few days of relatively heavy use. On the day I bought it, I used it for somewhere around 8 hours on and off while getting it setup as I wanted it, installing some apps and generally breaking it in. Last Friday I jailbroke it with the new Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak and it got many hours of use through the day and night testing the superb new Quasar jailbreak app that allows some real multitasking on the iPad. In fact that evening I did a lot of testing of running multiple windowed apps – watching video on Hulu Plus, playing a football manager game, and running Twitter, Reeder, Flipboard and others nearly all the time.

My everyday iPad 3 also gets great battery life – but this new one has just highlighted it nicely for me – with its impressive eight day initial run.