I'm always up for learning how to get more out of my iPad Air and iPad mini, and so I read with interest a great post on BuzzFeed: "19 Mind-Blowing Tricks Every iPhone And iPad User Should Know." One that surprised me: if you turn on Airplane Mode, your iPhone will charge twice as fast. Another helpful tip is how to use Google Maps offline while you're traveling, in case you don't have an Internet connection. While you do have an Internet connection, load the map you want to save. Then type "ok maps" in the search bar to cache it for offline use. Another helpful tip is that you can take a photo or start video recording via your Apple or Apple-compatible earbuds. If you're in camera mode, press the volume + button to take a photo. In video mode, press the play/pause button. Another useful tip regarding earbuds: quickly press play/pause twice to go to the next track, and quickly press it three times to go to the previous track. (I had mixed success with this using my third-party earbuds, but it worked well enough to be useful.)
And here's a great tip if you've been scrolling a long page and want to quickly get back to the top: simply tap the top bar of the app to jump back to the top. If you like to take naps, you can simply tell Siri to "Wake me up in an hour," and Siri will set an alarm for an hour from now.
There are lots more, so be sure to check out the post.
Another great collection of tips and tricks for iPad users can be found on Digital Trends. Some are pretty basic, but again others are new to me, and most also apply to the iPhone. Perhaps the most helpful is the link the post gives to the free iPad manual that's available online. There are a couple tips related to privacy if, uh, you'd rather that others not know what you're using your device for. Go to Settings>Safari in order to clear your browsing history by tapping Clear History and Clear Cookies and Data. The tips also say that you can enable Private Browsing by going to Settings>Safari, but the Private Browsing setting doesn't seem to be available there. Instead, tap on the address bar in any web page, and in addition to bringing up the keyboard, it also shows a Private option at the top left of the keyboard. Tap it, and your browser background at the top turns black to indicate you're in privacy mode. Tap it again to turn it off.