Five cool iPad tricks

Roberto Caprio

Here are five useful tricks to enhance your experience with 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 set-up 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 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: Pinch the screen with three fingers

3. Increase battery life: Your new iPad is expected to have at least nine 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/Wi-Fi, 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 hours 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 a song you really like and want the name of the song: 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 your 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.