The Kindle may not hold a candle to the iPad as far as tablets go, but its rechargeable battery puts even Apple’s rechargeable batteries to shame.

The Amazon Kindle is to books what the iPod was to iTunes and .mp3s. More than anything, the tablet is a proprietary gadget for Amazon to sell more books with a lot less overhead. Sure, you can read .pdfs on it, and its 3G wireless technology lets you download books everywhere from Sydney to the Gobi desert, but if you’re not a bookworm, the Kindle holds little value, particularly when compared to the alpha tablet now dominating the gadget market — Apple’s iPad.

As you already know from Steve Jobs’ convocation in January and an onslaught of promotional campaigns, the iPad manages to give users the same ability to download and read books, and then some. While Apple is using the iPad to sell iTunes, apps, and plenty of other stuff like iPad cases and accessories, the iPad is chiefly a comprehensive tablet that offers so much versatile functionality that its applications are almost limitless; the iPad will be used at home, work, or on the go in any number of settings and situations. There’s really nothing Apple can learn from Amazon’s lowly Kindle.

Except when it comes to rechargeable batteries.

The Apple battery is the result of the company having spent huge amounts of time and resources on improving rechargeable battery technology for its laptops and gadgets. And their results have been impressive. In addition to their MacBook and MacBook Pro rechargeable batteries running for hours and being able to be recharged 1000 times, the iPad rechargeable battery has taken the technology one step farther. Apple boasts that their iPad battery can last for up to 10 hours, with some users reporting 11 and even 12 hour charges. This is a pretty impressive feature for a device that lives most of its life on the go; a good rechargeable battery is a necessity.

But the rechargeable battery is the one feature where the Amazon Kindle outclasses the iPad — by a mile.

The 10+ hour charge on the iPad’s rechargeable battery seems impressive — until you read about the Kindle’s battery. While both the iPad battery and Kindle battery share the same battery chemistry — Lithium-polymer — the Amazon Kindle’s rechargeable battery runs between 1 and 2 weeks before needing to be recharged! The range in charge depends on whether or not the wireless network on the device is turned on or off, but for all intents and purposes, you could sojourn across the Australian outback on foot, reading Joyce’s Ulysses or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and not need to recharge until you reach the beach.

Apple, of course, will tell you that the Kindle’s ability to hold such a long charge compared to the iPad battery is nothing more than the huge difference in processor power: the beefiest chip the Kindle series uses is the Kindle 2′s Intel 532 MHz processor. The iPad, on the other hand, sports a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, which they tout as a “high performance, low power chip.” It, of course, makes sense that the Kindle’s rechargeable battery doesn’t need to churn out as much juice as the iPad’s battery. But fair is fair: obviously, the Kindle has the inside track on rechargeable battery technology.

Now that 3G wireless systems are common, the last bastion of gadget limitation is the battery: your mobile gadget is only as mobile as its battery. If Apple wants to continue to move the ball forward in mobile computing, catching up to the Amazon Kindle in rechargeable batteries might be a good idea.

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