5 quick and nifty Apple iPad tricks

There is something to be said for the ease and simplicity of use of Apple products. Most of the time, they just offer elegant and extremely user friendly solutions.

Here are five useful tricks to enhance your experience with the Apple iPad.

1. Enable ‘Send Last Location’ to make it easier to find your iPad

Find my iPad is now enabled by default (during the initial setup process), rather than asking users to enable it manually. This is a very useful feature when you’ve lost or misplaced your iPad. Set up a free iCloud account and you will be able to locate, lock or erase your iPad. You will also be able to prevent it from being erased or reactivated without your password, which renders a stolen iPad totally useless. However, prior to iOS 8, one of the downsides of the feature was that if the device ran out of battery then the feature was useless as you couldn’t track it.

Now there is a new feature called “Send Last Location”, which will automatically send the last location of your iPad to Apple when the battery is critically low.

How to enable Send Last Location to help you find your iPad:

• Launch the Settings app
• Scroll down and tap on iCloud
• Scroll down again and tap on Find my iPad
• Tap on the On/Off toggle to enabled Send Last Location toggle.

2. View all your Safari tabs at once, plus see tabs open on other devices signed into iCloud

It’s super easy, simply pinch the screen with three fingers in both apps.

3. Increase the battery life

Your new iPad is expected to have at least 9 hours of battery life. Your battery life will vary as per your usage, so if, for example, you listen to your music from the Music app and not stream off LTE/3G/WiFi, your battery life will last much longer. You can check the battery usage and standby time since the last full charge via the Settings app, under the Time since last full charge section (Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage). iOS 8 gives you a breakdown of battery usage by apps. Follow these instructions to identify the battery hogs.

• Launch the Settings app
• Tap on General
• Tap on Usage
• Tap on Battery Usage

iPad Battery Usage Info will let you know battery usage stats for the last 24 hrs or for the last week, then you can decide how to fine tune the apps that are responsible for heavy battery usage.

4. When you hear ‘that song’ and you don’t know its name

Ask Siri (long press the home button) “What is this song?” and your personal assistant will tell you who is the artist and the name of the song. In fact, you will be able to buy it there and then from the iTunes store.

5. You like to type with your thumbs while holding the iPad

If that’s the case then try splitting the keyboard. Simply touch and hold on either side of the virtual keyboard, and swipe out toward the edges of your iPad, the keyboard will split in two. You can stick it back together by holding each side and swiping into the middle. You can also press and hold the keyboard icon at the bottom right of the virtual keyboard to split it, or undock it from the bottom of the screen and move it elsewhere.

Feature image: bfishadow via Flickr