With 4G LTE connectivity, a Retina display, and a powerful Apple A5X system-on-a-chip under the hood, the new iPad needs a lot of power.

According to a post at ZDNet, the source of all that energy is a whopping 11,666 mAh battery — 70% greater capacity than the battery in the iPad 2.

What’s amazing about this news is that Apple increased the battery capacity without drastically increasing either the size or the weight of the batteries. As ZDNet notes, this “suggests that Apple has managed to increase significantly the power density of the Li-ion cells that it uses.”

If that’s true, it means that the next-generation iPhone (no way am I going to refer to it as the iPhone 5 after what Apple pulled on Wednesday…) could presumably have much better battery life than the iPhone 4S with little or no increase in weight or size, assuming that the device uses the same Retina display and adds 4G LTE.

Hats off to Apple’s battery labs and to the manufacturers of this nice little power plant. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see the little gray slabs of energy in iFixit’s upcoming iPad (Early 2012) teardown.

You can follow iPhoneFirmware.com on Twitter or join our Facebook fan page to keep updated on the latest jailbreak and unlock news.