Access Alternate Characters
Touch and hold a character on the onscreen keyboard to view related characters. For example, holding the E key brings up accented E characters, or holding the $ key brings up other currency symbols. Have some fun and check them out, there are a number of keys; Y, U, I, O, !, & just to name a few.
Curly Quotes
There are many variations of quotes and finding them in iPad's keyboard can be counter
productive.
Just tap and hold any quotes key and you get a selection of possibilities.
Easy Apostrophe
I use apostrophe's all the time; see I just used one. But this is a key that's not visible on the
integrated virtual keyboard so it's a huge hassle typing them.
Press and hold the comma key. A pop-up variation appears with an apostrophe, and it even
appears highlighted, which means you don't have to move your finger to select it. Simply tap,
hold for a moment, then release to create the apostrophe.
Lock Rotate
This may not qualify as much of a secret, since Apple promotes the feature, but in my early
experience, it's terrifically useful. Flick the switch above the volume controls to lock screen
rotation. The iPad is quite sensitive to orientation, and rotates its screen with little provocation.
Locking rotation means sticking with the view you're in, even as you shift position, or place the
iPad flat on a surface.
Better Battery Life
The iPad battery can last for up to 10 hours, but you can squeak out a bit more usage. Drag the brightness slider (under Settings, Brightness) as low as you can stand, turn off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (under Settings), don't play and videos or music, and avoid gaming apps.
Turn off or decrease the timing for data fetching. Data that is updated regularly includes email notifications and RSS feeds.
Turn off Location Services. Active use of maps and other location services will drain battery life. If left on, Maps updates continuously, something that you don't need draining your battery.
Web Pages as Apps.
Instead of using bookmarks to get back to frequently visited web pages, consider creating
desk-top icons for those most important pages.
In Safari, tap the Add Bookmark icon (+), select "Add To Home Screen", and then tap the
Add button. An icon shortcut to the page will be added to your desktop.
Find Apps Quickly
Now that you have many dozens of apps on your iPad, it's sometimes difficult to find that app
you want quickly.
Double tap the home screen button and type the first few characters of the app name.
Chances are good it'll be right there. Tap on it and you're running it.
Organizing Apps
Most people think that organizing apps on your iPad (or iPhone) must be done on the device.
This isn't true - you can use iTunes to drag and drop app icons wherever you want.
Connect and select your iPad, then select the Apps tab and drag icons from the top window
frame to the frame where you want to place any given icon.
Faster End-of-Sentence
Instead of typing a period at the end of each sentence, just double-tap the space bar. It will
enter a period followed by a space. The same trick works on the iPhone.
By default, iPad's email app is configured to show only 2 lines, probably a hold-over from
iPhone, but impractically small for iPad.
Go to Settings | Mail, Contacts and Calendars and select "5 lines" under Preview. Also, while
you're at it, you might want to update your Push email from "Manual" if you like to have your
messages waiting when you open the Mail app. Note - push features tend to drain battery power
a bit more quickly.
Switching Keyboards
Most of us assume you need to disable your Bluetooth keyboard to get the virtual keyboard to
come up. This is not true - simply hit the eject button on your Bluetooth keyboard and iPad will
launch the internal keyboard.
Fast Scroll to Top
You're reading a very lengthy web page and realize you want to get back to the top. Few
people realize that a double tap on the bezel above the browser (the title bar) is possible and will
instantly scroll to the top.
iPad Screenshot
Many people don't realize you can do this on any iOS device: screenshot anything you're
looking at with a simple button combination.
Push the top (power) and home buttons at the same time for about a half second. The screen
image will be stored in your photo library.
