One of the great selling points to using an iPad over many other tablets on the market is battery life. Apple promotes that their iPads will last a full day (10 hours) while operating the device under normal conditions. While the word "normal" differs from person to person, the fact remains... battery life on the iPad is, in general, pretty amazing.

This is especially useful for those who travel. For many travelers (dare I say even business travelers?), it's not unrealistic to think that all you need to take is your iPad (and phone, of course). I know plenty business travelers who leave their "heavy" laptops at the office while they spend days at a time airport- and hotel-hopping. I'm one of them. For most of the traveling that I do, I leave my MacBook Pro at home. In order to do this, however, it's important to maximize battery life on your iPad. Here are some simple tips to help maximize your iPad's battery life.

Dim the screen

The number one component for sucking battery life is the display itself. They're (relatively) big and packed with nearly 3.2 million pixels (Retina models). That requires a lot of battery. Although you can't reduce the number of pixels, you can reduce the brightness of those pixels. In most cases, changing your display brightness to 50% still leaves you with more than enough brightness (especially for indoor use), and you'll find that your battery just gained an extra hour or more of life.

Away with Bluetooth

Bluetooth is an essential part of communicating with other devices around you. It's a key ingredient to making AirDrop work as well as it does, for example. However, in reality, this feature is probably used very infrequently while traveling. As a result, you can easily turn Bluetooth off and not miss it too much.

Disable WiFi & LTE (when not in use)

Having access to the rest of the world is critical when traveling. While I don't recommend completely turning off WiFi and LTE, both of these technologies do use a significant amount of power. If you know you aren't going to be using them while reading a book on the beach or presenting to the Board, switch them off. Even if that gives you back 15 minutes of battery life, that's still 15 minutes of battery life that you have to use at the end of your long day.

Airplane Mode isn't just for in-flight

If you really want to conserve power, why not go all the way?! Rather than disabling your wireless radios individually (Bluetooth, WiFi, LTE), you can turn them all off with the tap of one feature... Airplane Mode. This feature isn't just for in-flight, but can be used anytime you want to completely disconnect yourself from the world.

All of these settings are super simple to change in iOS 7. Just swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal Control Center. From here, you can do any or all of the above, as well as control your audio, volume, etc.