Table of contents for Issue 75 in iPad User Magazine

Welcome to iPad User Magazine, helping you to do more with your iPad

Great news! Not only is iPadOS 15 finally here, but Apple has released two new iPads in the last month, a new iPad mini and an update to the standard iPad, which is just called iPad. Both are updated for 2021 with new processors and more. This issue we’ve been putting the new iPad mini through its paces and you can read what we thought about it on page 22. It’s probably no surprise that we loved Apple’s latest mini marvel, but there was a bit of concern in the media that it suffered from ‘jelly scrolling’, which is a kind of wobbly visual effect when you scroll rapidly through pages of text. However, we didn’t really notice it and suspect a lot of the videos you see online have…

1 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

Make your Watch last longer

> You can improve your Watch’s battery in the following ways… Choose a minimal watch face design (or switch off Display & Brightness > Always On). Enable Reduce Motion under General > Accessibility. Connect to your iPhone via Bluetooth for connectivity. Then follow the same suggestions for your iPhone, such as minimise app and email notifications, reduce brightness, and so on.…

1 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

The best battery boosters

iPad power banks Mophie Powerstation All-In-One £129.95 FROM zagg.com/en_uk FEATURES 8,000mAh battery, wireless charging, 1x USB-C port, 1x USB-A port This portable charger is aimed firmly at the iPad user on the go. It can charge up to four supported devices at once, with wireless options for compatible iPhones and AirPods. There’s also USB-C and USB-A options, and you’ll even find a pop-up magnetic charger for your Apple Watch. Belkin Pocket Power 5K Power Bank £24.99 FROM belkin.com/uk FEATURES 5,000mAh, USB-A port It’s slim, unobtrusive and minimalistic, but the USB-A port is capable of charging any iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch with the right cable. Its capacity doesn’t match anything else in this list, but again this power bank is for portability, and you should still be able to charge…

2 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

BOOST YOUR BATTERY LIFE

Are you getting the max use out of your mobile devices’ batteries? Despite all the technological innovations of the past few decades, your Apple devices – from the Watch all the way up to your MacBook – rely on a type of battery first used in commercial devices back in 1991. That said, today’s lithium-ion batteries are a far superior beast to their predecessors, and with each successive generation, Apple finds ways to improve them further. But they’re not perfect. Batteries don’t last forever, for starters, and rarely achieve the maximums quoted in the promotional literature. But, armed with our tips and techniques, you can improve the performance of all your Apple devices to deliver longer use between charges, and to maintain your battery’s overall health for longer. In this…

1 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

HOW TO Reduce power consumption

1 Background app refresh Navigate to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. Tap On to switch it off, or restrict its use to Wi-Fi only. You can also scroll down and prevent unused apps from draining your battery without having to remove them. 2 GPS usage Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. Set individual apps to Never or ‘While Using the App’, and review System Services too. Go to Privacy > Bluetooth to review (and block) apps that are using your Bluetooth connection. 3 Wi-Fi over mobile Whenever you have the option of Wi-Fi for your connection, disable your mobile internet connection, which uses far more power. In poor signal areas, switch Airplane Mode on to avoid wasting energy looking for a connection.…

1 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

iPad vs Mac

IT USED TO be the case that choosing between a MacBook and an iPad was easy, but Apple has started to blur the lines between the two in ways that few of us could have expected. In terms of power, we have now reached parity thanks to the new iPad Pro which uses the same M1 chip as the MacBook Air, and when you start to look at the storage onboard the comparisons become even closer. For example, you can buy a 12.9–inch iPad Pro for only around £200 more than the equivalent 256GB MacBook Air, but if you opt for the 11–inch iPad Pro then you can pay only £100 more than the 256GB MacBook Air for 512GB of storage. This makes the cost analysis almost moot, which is…

14 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

Bring order to chaos

IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use FamilyWall as an organiser YOU’LL NEED FamilyWall (free, IAPs), more than one iOS/iPadOS device Genius tip! If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get 25GB of cloud storage that you can use instead of iCloud to store and share family photos. Organising children is like herding cats, only harder. There are meals to plan, lunches to buy, playdates to attend, kit to wash… the list seems never-ending. Thankfully apps such as FamilyWall can help even the most harassed parent organise everything. At its heart FamilyWall is a shared calendar system that works across everybody’s iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. You can quickly create events that include some or all of your family and their circle of friends, set reminders and…

3 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

Boost your iPhone/iPad battery

However carefully you look after your iPhone or iPad, its battery has a limited shelf life. If you’re convinced your mobile isn’t running as fast as it used to, it’s not just a case of planned obsolescence; it may also indicate your battery is past its best. Fix battery problems As batteries age, they begin to lose their capacity to hold a charge for as long as they used to. And as this diminishes, the likelihood of your phone suddenly shutting down unexpectedly increases too. As a result, iOS contains performance management technologies that are designed to cap the maximum performance of your phone’s CPU or GPU to prevent it overloading an ageing battery. The knock-on effect is that overall performance decreases. If you’ve noticed your phone starting to slow…

3 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

What is Low Power Mode?

> When you need to eke out as much battery life as possible on your iPad, you need to switch on the new Low Power Mode. New in iPadOS 15, Low Power Mode prompts you to turns on when your battery drops to 20% anyway, but you can switch it on manually at any time via Settings > Battery, at which point your battery indicator turns yellow. Low Power Mode disables email fetch and background app refreshes, automatic downloads, several visual effects and defaults Auto-Lock to 30 seconds. iCloud Photos are temporarily paused, and 5G is disabled for everything except video streaming. Low Power Mode automatically switches off when you’ve charged your iPhone to 80% or higher, but if you open Shortcuts, select Automation and tap Create Personal Automation, you…

1 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

Free up storage space

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to free up storage space on your iPhone or iPad YOU’LL NEED iPad Genius tip! To reduce the amount of space taken up by future Music downloads, turn Dolby Atmos downloads off in Settings > Music. Unless you have an iPad Pro with a storage capacity that’s measured in TB, the chances are that sooner or later you’ll run into the problem of not having enough storage space on your iPad or iPhone to do what you want to do. Often, it’s only when you come to update to a new version of the OS that you realise you’re running short of space. Thankfully, there is plenty you can do to clear out the clutter and create more free space. How…

3 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

iPad mini (2021)

From £479 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display (2266x1488 pixels), A15 Bionic chip, 64/256GB of storage, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C The iPad mini has long felt like the Cinderella product in Apple’s iPad line-up, introduced in 2012 and updated intermittently since, this year’s upgrade is its first since 2019. But, boy, has Apple made up for lost time. Like last year’s iPad Air, the iPad mini looks like an iPad Pro that’s been hit with a shrink ray – it’s squared-off edges and narrower bezels giving it the family feel of its bigger siblings, leaving the iPad 10.2in (p81) as the only model now boasting the old, and increasingly dated, original iPad design. The changes are certainly welcome. The new iPad mini now sports an 8.3-inch Liquid…

4 min

iPad User Magazine|Issue 75

BENCHMARKS Our analysis explained

GEEKBENCH 5 SINGLE-CORE TEST We use this cross-platform benchmarking tool to measure a device’s performance, with a single-core processor baseline of 1,000. Higher scores are better. 3DMARK WILD LIFE (2560X1440) This cross-platform benchmarking app measures a device’s graphics performance, running a one-minute test at 2560x1440 resolution. Higher frame rates are better. PERFORMANCETEST MOBILE (PASSMARK) Another cross-platform benchmarking tool for mobile devices, this one provides individual scores. Here we’re measuring storage read/write speeds.…

1 min