Just as iTunes can sync bookmarks and mail settings from your computer to your slab, so it can snag and display a copy of your daily or monthly schedule on your iPad—if you happen to use Outlook on your PC or iCal on your Mac. You can also use Entourage 2004 or later by choosing, in Entourage, Preferences→Sync Services and checking the option to have Entourage share its info with iCal. (Alas, Outlook 2011 for the Mac doesn’t sync calenders yet.)

To get your life in sync between computer and iPad, fire up iTunes and then:

On the iPad, tap the Calendar icon on the Home screen to see your schedule unfold in glorious color. If you have multiple calendars, tap the Calendars button to select one and see its events—or you can consolidate your appointments into one uber-calendar. Use the search box to find specific events.

Along the top of the screen, tap List, Day, Week, or Month to see your schedule for the short or long term, color-coded by calendar type (home, work, school, and so on). Tap the Today button to see what’s in your immediate future. List view displays your scheduled events one after the other. No matter which view you choose, the iPad shows the year’s months in a bar below the calendar. Tap the triangles on either side of the bar to go forward or backward in time.

The iPad isn’t a static version of your calendar. You can add events to and delete them from it and sync them back to your computer (or to your MobileMe or Exchange accounts). The iPad’s calendar also lets you subscribe to online calendars to keep you apprised of events on Web-based Google and Yahoo calendars—or even your favorite sports team’s schedule.

Add a Calendar Event

To punch in a new appointment or event, tap the button in the lower-right corner of the calendar screen. In the box that pops up, fill in all the necessary information, like the name of the event, location, and starting and ending times. (There’s also an All-Day option for those outdoor rock festivals and softball tournaments.) Tap Alert to be reminded about an appointment in advance—from five minutes to two days beforehand.

If you need a standing appointment, like a weekly banjo lesson or staff meeting, you have the option to repeat the event every day, every week, every other week, every month, or every year (like for your wedding anniversary or spouse’s birthday). There’s also a little Notes field in the Add Event box in case you need to remember some additional information about the appointment, like “Bring Q3 report” or “Take cat-allergy meds before leaving.”

Subscribe to an Online Calendar

To see a shared calendar or one you subscribe to, add it to the iPad. If it’s a specific calendar on the Web, choose Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars→Add Account→Other. Select the Add CalDAV Account option (when you want to add a datebook like a Google calendar; see http://bit.ly/iYvA5 for instructions) or Add Subscribed Calendar. Enter the calendar’s URL and any other account information you need to subscribe, like your user name and password.

Want to instantly add customized online calendars for all sorts of topics, including religious holidays, schedules of your favorite sports teams, movie release dates, and more—right on your iPad? Crank up the Safari browser and visit iCalShare.com (http://icalshare.com). When you find a calendar you want to add to your iPad’s collection, tap the Subscribe to Calendar button on the page, and then confirm your decision in the box that pops up. The new calendar gets added to your subscription list, and you see its events on your schedule. Tap the Calendars button and select it to show (or hide) those dates.

Calendars you add by subscription over the Internet are read-only, so you can’t add your own events to them. If you want to delete a calendar subscription, tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars. In the Accounts list, tap the name of the calendar and tap the red Delete Account button.

Tip

If you have an iPad calendar set up to sync with an Exchange account, you can respond to Outlook or Entourage meeting invitations that your colleagues send you. When you get a new invite, it lands on the scheduled date and time in your calendar with a dotted line around the event. You respond to it by tapping it on the calendar or by tapping to see pending invites. Select the one you wish to reply to. Tap Invitation From to get all the details, like who called the meeting and who else got invited. When you get an invitation, you can tap Accept, Maybe, or Decline to send off your RSVP. And if you get your meeting invitations by email instead, tap the Invite icon attachment on the message to open it up and respond to the sender. If you accept, the iPad adds the event to your calendar.

If you get a lot of meeting invitations and want to know as soon as they arrive, tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars. In the Calendars area of the screen, tap the On button next to New Invitation Alert.

Putting a copy of your contacts file—also known as your electronic address book—on your iPad is quite easy, as long as you use up-to-date software. Windows users need to have their contacts stored in Outlook Express, Outlook 2003 or later, Windows Contacts, or the Windows Address Book (used by Outlook Express and some other email programs).

Mac folks need to use at least Mac OS X 10.5 and the Mac OS X Address Book, which Apple’s Mail program uses to stash addresses. You can also use Outlook 2011 or Entourage 2004 and later, but you first have to link before you sync: In Entourage, choose Preferences and click Sync Services. Then turn on the checkboxes for sharing contacts with Address Book. Outlook or Entourage share the info, and Address Book syncs it up.

To turn your iPad into a big glass address book, follow these steps:

The iPad updates itself with the contact information stored in your address book. If you add new contacts while you have your iPad plugged in, choose File→Update iPad or click the Sync button in iTunes to manually move the new data over to your tablet.

To look up a pal on the iPad, tap the Home screen’s Contacts icon. Use the search box or, on the Contacts list, flick to the person’s name on the left side of the screen (take a shortcut by tapping the letter tab on the outer edge). Tap the name to see the person’s details. Here are some of things you can do now:

To delete a contact, whack it from your computer’s address book and the person will disappear from your iPad the next time you sync up. To delete a contact directly on the iPad, tap it open, tap Edit, and then tap Delete Contact.

Need a piece of virtual scratch paper to jot down a few thoughts? Have to type up a memo to email to colleagues, but don’t own the Pages app described in Chapter 10? Want to copy a recipe off a web page and save it for future reference, when you may not have online access? The iPad’s Notes program is here to serve. To get started, return to your Home screen and tap Notes. The program opens, and here’s where Apple’s designers got really creative.

When you hold the iPad in portrait mode, it looks like one of those yellow lined pads of paper you used to scribble lecture notes in school. But hold the iPad in landscape mode, as shown above, and the yellow pad shrinks down to size and shares the screen with a virtual slip of index paper, all tucked inside a faux leather folio, the kind made to sit on top of your desk and look fancy. You can even see stitches in the digital leather.

When you hold the iPad in portrait mode, you can see the same index of all your stored notes by tapping the Notes button in the upper-right corner of the screen. Tap any entry in the list to jump to that particular note and open it so you can read it—or add more text to it. All of the Cut | Copy | Paste | Replace functions described back in Chapter 2 work in Notes, so you can paste in gobs of text you copy from web pages and elsewhere. You can’t, however, paste picture files—you just get a string of text with the image file’s name and location.

To start a new note, tap the icon in the upper-right corner to generate a blank sheet of “paper.” Tap the yellow Note itself to summon the iPad’s keyboard for a little good-old-fashioned text entry. You can sync notes to and from a MobileMe or Windows Outlook account, too (see Sync Info).

If you’re looking for a certain word or words, type them into the search box to call up a list of all the notes where the words appear. To flip forward or backward through your collected notes, tap the arrow keys at the bottom of the screen. You can even email the contents of a note by tapping the icon down below. (Hey, it costs the price of a stamp to do that with a paper note nowadays, so you just saved a little cash.)

The second-generation iPad arrived in March 2011 sporting a feature many had hoped for and wanted: cameras on the front and back. This one-two camera punch gives new iPad owners the same hardware iPhone and iPod Touch folks have for FaceTime video calls, shooting movies, and snapping photos.

With its huge slab screen, the iPad is probably one of the more unwieldy point-and-shoot cameras out there, but it’s not exactly bursting with megapixels. While the rear camera can shoot 720p high-definition video at 30 frames per second, still photos from the rear camera have a resolution of just 1280 x 720 pixels (an average digicam has a resolution of about 1600 x 1200 pixels). And while the front camera’s VGA quality—640 x 480 pixels—is fine for online video chats, your regular digital camera shouldn’t feel threatened.

Since the early days of science-fiction movies and TV shows, the videophone has been a staple of fantasy communication. Cheap webcams and teleconferencing systems made the fantasy real, but they’re so last year. For modern convenience, the iPad makes and takes video calls thanks to FaceTime, its built-in mobile video-chat app. It’s like a real-time talking picture frame.

To use FaceTime, you need an Apple ID (Chapter 7) and a WiFi connection (sorry, no 3G). You also need folks to talk to, namely people running around with fourth-generation iPhones or iPod Touches, fellow second-generation iPad owners, or folks with Apple’s FaceTime program for Mac OS X.

Once you have all that, getting started with FaceTime is easy:

If you need to temporarily turn off the sound during a call (like when the baby starts screaming), tap the Mute icon () in the screen’s bottom-left corner.

Want to show your friend what you’re seeing without physically flipping the iPad around? Tap the icon ion the right side of the toolbar to switch to the iPad’s rear camera. Tap the icon again to return the view to you.

Remember those old-fashioned instant-portrait kiosks that can still be found in arcades or along the boardwalk? You know, the kind where you get a strip of four black-and-white shots for a buck, and you and your pals all cram together to make goofy faces for the camera? The second-generation iPad can do the same thing, but better—the pictures are free and in color. Meet Photo Booth.

Like its predecessor (part of Mac OS X for years), Photo Booth is a simple app for taking your own picture, say, if you need a quick headshot for your Facebook page. You can use Photo Booth with the rear camera as well; just tap the icon to switch back and forth between cameras. But for loads more fun, you can also add one of eight special effects to your photo, including several funhouse-mirror style distortions, a thermal camera simulation, or even a creepy faux x-ray filter.

Here’s how to get going with Photo Booth:

A small thumbnail version of your photo slides into the photo tray underneath the mail screen. Tap the photo to see it full-size. Tap the button to email or copy the image. To delete a photo from Photo Booth, tap its thumbnail in the photo tray. Then tap the button in the corner of the thumbnail image and tap Delete Photo.

Copies of your Photo Booth pictures are also saved to Photos→Camera Roll, so you can share the pictures from there, too (Email and Print Photos).

YouTube, which started in 2005, has become the spot to share and see video from around the world. While YouTube videos on the Web usually come in the Flash format, a technology foreign to the iPad, Apple convinced the site to re-encode its millions of videos into H.264 format, a much higher-quality rendering than Flash—and one you can play via the iPad’s YouTube app. Here’s how.

The iPad’s Maps app makes you forget all about those folded paper roadmaps that always end up stained and crumpled in the back seat of the car. Tap open the Maps app on the Home screen. Type any address into the Maps app—and you instantly see it on the screen, its location marked with a virtual red pin. All your usual iPad finger moves work on the maps, so you can zoom, scroll, pinch, and flick your way around the world.

Like Safari, though, Maps needs an Internet connection to pull its data down from the Web, so it’s not the best thing in the world for emergency directions when you’re lost in a bad part of town with only a Wi-Fi iPad. (If you ponied up the big bucks for a Wi-Fi + 3G model, you don’t have to worry about lack of an Internet connection, but you may still have to worry about getting mugged.)

To plot your course, tap the Maps icon on the Home screen. Here are some of the things you can do with Maps and a network connection:

Ever look at a map and wonder exactly where you are in relation to the place you’re trying to get to? Unless that map has one of those You Are Here arrows, you usually have to guess—but not if you have an iPad.

Just make sure you have an Internet connection and your Location Services turned on (WiFi), too. Then tap the Current Location icon () at the top of the Maps screen. The iPad drops a blue dot on the map to mark your position to within a few hundred yards. While the Wi-Fi iPad doesn’t have a GPS chip inside it like the 3G ’Pad does, it does have software that calculates your position based on a big database of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers.

You can even combine the ability to instantly find your current location with getting directions to someplace else. Just tap the Directions button at the top of the screen. Unless you’re offline, the iPad usually starts with your current location in the first box. In the second box, type in a destination address or tap the button to get to your contact addresses. Once it has the starting and ending points of your journey, the iPad pops up a blue bar offering driving, mass transit, or walking directions (see the next page for more on getting directions).

If you want to use your current position and navigate your way Boy Scout-style, the iPad includes a built-in digital compass. To use it, tap the Current Location icon once to get your position, and then tap it again to activate the digital compass, which appears on the iPad screen. To rotate the compass-point north, hold the iPad parallel to the ground. To get back to regular map view, tap the Compass icon () in the toolbar.

If a message with a symbol appears on the screen as shown here, you need to calibrate the compass, which is normal the first time you use it. Firmly grip the iPad and wave it in an “air Figure 8” pattern to fine-tune its sense of direction.

Need to find your way from Point A to Point B, or at least from Albany to Boston? To map your route, tap the Directions button at the top of the screen. A two-field box appears. If you don’t want to use your current location, tap the in the Start box and type in a point of origin. In the End box, type in the destination address or tap the icon and choose one from your list of bookmarked sites, recent visits, or contacts.

Once the iPad gets the starting and ending points, it calculates how to get there by car, mass transit (like train or bus), or foot. Tap the car, bus, or walking-person icon to get a set of step-by-step directions. If you’re in the middle of nowhere, driving directions may be all you see here. (If you need to reverse the starting and ending points of the trip, tap the icon.)

The iPad delivers your directions in the blue bar. Tap the Start button to get going. You can see each step of your journey in one of two ways:

Unless you chose the mass-transit directions, you also get an approximate travel time for the trip. (If you did ask for mass-transit directions, tap the clock icon to get a list of transit schedules.) If you have an Internet connection as you go, the route can also update current traffic conditions.

All the photos you sync to the iPad from your computer, take with the iPad’s camera, save from email messages, web pages, and iPad screenshots (see the Tip on Tip), all live in the Photos app. Tap the Photos app icon (represented by a happy sunflower) to open it up and see what’s there.

After you get some photos on the iPad, this app takes care of the sorting for you. You’ll find photos that were in albums on your computer in same-named albums on your iPad. You can also see all your pictures in a loose collection by tapping the Photos button at the top of the screen.

Tap any photo thumbnail to open an album or the photo itself to full-screen size. Chapter 15 has all the information about getting pictures on your iPad, showing them off, making slideshows, and more. So if you’re a photography enthusiast and want flip ahead right now, this chapter understands.

Tap the Videos icon to find all the movies, TV shows, video podcasts, and music videos you have on your iPad. If you use the iPad’s Home Sharing feature (Use iTunes Home Sharing on Your iPad), you can also check out the iTunes libraries of the computers in your Home Sharing network, too; look under the Shared tab.

If you don’t have any stuff yet, you can get video content in a couple of ways—download it directly to the iPad from the iTunes Store (Chapter 11) or sync compatible clips from your computer to your iPad (Chapter 14). And for the record, the Videos app is where your downloaded content lives; the YouTube app (mentioned earlier in this chapter) is for streaming cool clips from YouTube’s perch on the Internet. Videos you shoot on the iPad land in Photos→Camera Roll, though, as Shooting Videos explains.

Once you have videos, tap Home→Videos. The iPad sorts your collection by type: movies, TV shows, podcasts, and music videos. Tap an icon to play the video. In the case of TV shows, where you may have multiple episodes, tap the show’s icon and, on the following screen, tap the episode you want to see.

The iPad’s high-resolution screen shows off high-quality video files quite nicely. With a folding case or an extra pillow propped up on your stomach, you have a whole new way to watch TV in bed now—without having to dig around under the blankets for the remote control.

The original boxy white-and-chrome iPod from 2001 is one of Apple’s greatest success stories, and its legacy lives on with the iPad. To listen to music or see what tunes you have on your tablet, tap the orange-and-white iPod icon on the iPad’s Home screen.

The iPad’s iPod is an elegantly designed and organized app, made to help you find your music quickly, sorted by songs, artists, albums, genres, or composers. The items in your library (music, spoken-word podcasts, audiobooks, and custom-made playlists) appear in a neat vertical list along the left side of the screen, all awaiting your tap. If you’re tapping into your computer’s iTunes library with the iPad’s Home Sharing feature (Use iTunes Home Sharing on Your iPad), you see a gray Library bar at the top of the left column; tap it to get the goods.

If this all sounds perfectly fine but you don’t actually have any music loaded or shared on your iPad, take a stroll to Chapter 13 for further instructions. You can also download music directly to your iPad, right from the iTunes Store, as the next page explains.

The purple iTunes icon and the blue App Store icon on the Home Screen are all about shopping. Some people will find this very exciting, the chance to buy fresh new things directly on the iPad, with no cables, cars, or crankiness involved. All you need is a live Internet connection and a working credit-card number.

For much more on the iTunes Store—where you can buy music, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, and download free audio and video podcasts—take a stroll to Chapter 11.

If apps are your thing and you want to find new programs to run on your iPad, you don’t have as far to go. Just turn the page to leave this chapter and move on to Chapter 7, which is all about the App Store.