Our first tip can help you type faster in two ways. One, it helps you type more accurately; two, it lets you type punctuation and numerals faster than ever before.

Over the course of this book, you find out how to tap, how to double-tap, and even how to double-tap with two fingers. Now we want to introduce you to a new gesture we like to call the slide.

To do the slide, you start by performing the first half of a tap. That is, you touch your finger to the screen but don't lift it. Now, without lifting your finger, slide it onto the key you want to type. You'll know you're on the right key because it changes from one shade of gray to another.

First, try the slide during normal typing. Stab at a key and if you miss, rather than lifting your finger, backspacing, and trying again, do the slide onto the proper key. After you get the hang of it, you'll see that it saves a lot of time and improves your accuracy as well.

Now here's the best part: You can use the slide to save time with punctuation and numerals, too. The next time you need to type a punctuation mark or number, try this technique:

The cool thing is that the punctuation and numeric keyboard disappears and the alphabetical keyboard reappears — all without tapping the 123 key to display the punctuation and numeric keyboard and without tapping the ABC key (the key to the left of the Space key when the punctuation and numeric keyboard is active).

Practice the slide for typing letters, punctuation, and numerals, and we guarantee that in a few days, you'll be typing faster and more accurately.

Here are two related tips about autocorrection that can also help you type faster and more accurately.

When your iPad is selected in the sidebar in iTunes, you see a colorful chart at the bottom of the screen that tells you how your iPad's capacity is being used by your media and other data.

By default, the chart shows the amount of space that your audio, video, and photo files use on your iPad in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB). But you knew that. What you probably don't know is that when you click the colorful chart, it cycles through two more slightly different displays. The first click changes the display from the amount of space used to the number of items (audio, video, and photos) you have stored. Click once more, and the display changes to the total playing time for audio and video, as shown in Figure 18-1.

This is particularly helpful before you go on a trip. Knowing that you have 8.2 days of audio and 13.7 hours of video is far more useful than knowing how many gigabytes you're packing.

Assault on batteries

Because this is a chapter of tips and hints, we'd be remiss if we didn't include some ways that you can extend your battery life. First and foremost: If you use a carrying case, charging the iPad while it's in that case may generate more heat than is healthy. Overheating is bad for both battery capacity and battery life. So take the iPad out of the case before you charge it.

If you're not using power-thirsty 3G or Wi-Fi networks, or a Bluetooth device (such as a headset), consider turning off the features you don't need in Settings. Doing so could mean the difference between running out of juice before you get to the end of a movie.

Activate Auto-Brightness to enable the screen brightness to adjust based on current lighting conditions. Using this setting can be easier on your battery. Tap Settings on the Home screen, tap Brightness, and then tap the On/Off switch, if necessary, to turn it on.

Turning off Location Services (tap Settings

Finally, turning on EQ (see Chapter 8) when you listen to music can make it sound better, but it also uses more processing power. If you've selected an equalizer preset for a track in the iTunes Track Info window and you want to retain the EQ from iTunes when you listen on your iPad, set the EQ on your iPad to flat. Because you're not turning off EQ, your battery life will be slightly worse, but your songs will sound just the way you expect them to sound. Either way, to alter your EQ settings, tap Settings

Figure 18-1. Click the colorful chart, and what's stored on your iPad is expressed in different ways.

Here's the situation: You're listening to a podcast or audiobook and trying to find the beginning of a specific segment by moving the Scrubber left and right. The only problem is that the Scrubber isn't very precise and your fat finger keeps moving it too far one way or the other. Never fear — your iPad has a wonderful (albeit somewhat hidden) fix. Just press your finger on the Scrubber (that little round dot on the Scrubber bar), but instead of sliding your finger to the left or right, slide it downward toward the bottom of the screen (see Figure 18-2). As you slide, the scrubbing speed changes like magic and the amount of change is displayed below the Scrubber bar. The default (normal) speed is called hi-speed scrubbing. When you slide your finger downward an inch or two, the speed changes to half-speed scrubbing. Drag another inch or two and it changes to quarter-speed scrubbing. Drag downward to near the bottom of the screen and it changes to fine scrubbing.

This scrub trick is easier to do than to explain, so give it a try.

Figure 18-2. Press the Scrubber and slide your finger downward to change the scrubbing rate.

The iPad does something special when it encounters an e-mail address or a URL in e-mail messages. It interprets character sequences that look like Web addresses (URLs), such as http://www.WebSiteName.com or www.WebSiteName.com, and any sequences that look like e-mail addresses, such as [email protected]. When the iPad sees what it assumes to be a URL or e-mail address, it appears as a blue link on your screen.

If you tap a URL or e-mail address like the ones just shown, the iPad does the right thing. It launches Safari, takes you to the appropriate Web page for a URL, and starts a new e-mail message for an e-mail address. So don't bother with copy and paste if you don't have to — tap those blue links and the right thing will happen every time.

Here's another cool Safari trick, this time with links. If you press and hold a link rather than tapping it, a little floating text bubble appears and shows you the underlying URL. In addition it offers three options:

Finally, here's one last Safari trick. If you press and hold most images, Save Image and Copy buttons appear. Tap Save Image and the picture is saved to the Saved Photos album in the Albums tab of the Photos app; tap Copy and it's copied to the Clipboard so that you can paste it into an e-mail message or document created in another app (such as Apple's Pages or Keynote).

Ever stumble onto a Web page you just have to share with a buddy? The iPad makes it dead simple. From the site in question, tap the + button at the bottom of the browser. Then tap the Mail Link to This Page button that appears on-screen. A mail message appears with the subject line prepopulated with the name of the Web site you're visiting and the body of the message prepopulated with the URL. Just type something in the message body (or don't), supply your pal's e-mail address, and then tap the Send button.

You may have noticed that there's no home page Web site on the iPad version of Safari as there is in the Mac and PC versions of the browser (and for that matter, every other Web browser we know of). Instead, when you tap the Safari icon, you return to the last site you visited.

The trick is to create an icon for the page you want to use as your home page. This technique is called creating a Web clip of a Web page. Here's how to do it:

See the tip in Chapter 1 for rearranging icons if you've forgotten how. And consider moving the Safari icon to a different Home screen so you never tap it by accident. Finally, remember that the Dock has room for six icons even though it only has four by default. So you could, if you like, have both Safari and your new Web clip icon in the Dock so you can tap either one depending upon your needs.

Figure 18-3. The B.L. Dot Com icon appears where Safari usually appears in the dock.

A tiny Massachusetts software company known as Ecamm Network is selling an inexpensive piece of Mac OS X software that lets you copy files from your computer to your iPad and copy files from the iPad to a computer. (No Windows version is available.) Better still, you can try the $19.95 program called PhoneView for a week before deciding whether you want to buy it. Go to www.ecamm.com to fetch the free demo.

In a nutshell, here's how it works. After downloading the software to your Mac, double-click the program's icon to start it. To transfer files and folders to the iPad (assuming that you have room on the device), click the Copy to iPad button on the toolbar, and then select the files you want to copy. The files are copied into the appropriate folder on the iPad. Alternatively, you can drag files and folders from the Mac desktop or a folder into the PhoneView browser.

To go the other way and copy files from your iPad to your computer, highlight the files or folders you want to be copied and click the Copy from iPad button on the toolbar. Select the destination on your Mac where you want to store the files, and then click Save. You can also drag files and folders from the PhoneView file browser onto the Mac desktop or folder. Or, you can double-click a file in the PhoneView browser to download it to your Mac's Documents folder.

If you need access to the files on your iPad, or if you want to use your iPad as a pseudo–hard drive, PhoneView is a bargain.

Many people, including us, have compared the iPad to an iPhone on steroids. Only the iPad isn't actually a phone.

Don't let that stop you from making or even receiving phone calls on the tablet.

Come again?

You read right. You can make and even receive phone calls on your iPad. After all, two of the key components to calling are built into the iPad: a speaker and microphone. Now all you'll have to do is head to the App Store to fetch a third, an app that takes advantage of what's known as VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. In plain-speak, that means turning the iPad into a giant iPhone. And yes, you can find more than one app to do the trick.

We've checked out Skype, Toktumi's Line2 (both iPhone apps as this book went to press), along with Truphone, which has a version for the large iPad screen. The apps themselves are free, although you have to pay for calls to regular phones.

True confession: We threw in this final tip because, well, it helps people like us.

Permit us to explain. We hope you've admired the pictures of the iPad screens that are sprinkled throughout this book. We also secretly hope that you're thinking what marvelous photographers we must be.

Well, the fact is, we couldn't take a blurry picture of the iPad using its built-in (and undocumented) screen-grab feature if we wanted to.

Press the Sleep/Wake button at the same time you press the Home button, but just for an instant. The iPad grabs a snapshot of whatever is on the screen.

The picture lands in the Saved Photos album in the Albums tab of the Photos app; from there, you can synchronize it with your PC or Mac, along with all your other pictures, or e-mail it to yourself or anyone else. And from there, the possibilities are endless. Why, your picture could wind up just about anywhere, including in a For Dummies book.