BlackBerry's typically have incredible battery life - far beyond that of any other smartphone I've used. Obviously this is a whole new kind of beast, with regards to both software and hardware. However, I'm confident (optimistic?) that RIM will have stuck to their legacy of excellent battery life with this latest offering.

Problem is that they've got a CPU that is (reportedly) twice as quick as what's in the iPad, more RAM... and 0.5 lbs less weight.

As we've seen from the iPad teardowns, the vast majority of the iPad's mass is the massive battery. 0.5 lbs seems like it's a lot to rob from a battery while increasing the power consumption of the device.

The Playbook's screen has about half the area of the iPad's. That will probably make a big difference in power consumption.

This is just bullshit. The reason BlackBerrys have decent battery life is because they run underpowered CPUs and OSes that do almost nothing.

This thing is completely different, running a dual core A9 and driving a high res screen on a new OS. It's going to chew through battery like crazy. Guaranteed.

The reason BlackBerries have decent battery life is the RIM back-end - they had true push email long before anyone else. So BBs don't have to poll the network, wasting power on a 3G connection.

I tend the lean the other way. If they had excellent battery life it would have been a bullet point in the spec list.

Not surprising there's no mention of battery life. Battery life is very dependent on software, which they'll be tweaking for months before the release.