In my opinion, Control Center on the iPad is analogous to a Swiss Army knife, only in electronic format. Like a Swiss army knife, it is the place to go to get things done. Control Center is a collection of utilities that you can reply on to solve a multitude of problems and gain access to them quickly and easily. It’s the control hub of your iPad.
Activating Control Center is simple and intuitive–in one motion, just swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Here you will find all you need to activate, disarm and adjust various settings and functions on your iPad. You can also activate Control Center from the lock screen and from within apps with the same swiping motion. You can turn these settings on and off in the Settings App under Control Center.
Highlighted (call-out) Controls starting in the upper left and moving in a clock-wise direction are as follows
- Wi-Fi. Tapping this button will allow you to turn your Wi-Fi on or off. Turning on will let you connect to Wi-FI hot-spots–however, you may still need to enter password information of your iPad detects a hot-spot that you have not previously connected to, or you instructed your iPad to “forget” the hot-spot after the last time you were connected.
- Bluetooth. This will turn your iPad’s Bluetooth connection on or off allowing your iPad to pair with a Bluetooth device such as a keyboard
- Do-not-Disturb. A great little utility that you can adjust to mute notifications and calls for pre-set times or on the fly as needed.
- Screen Lock. Locks the screen orientation in other portrait or Landscape mode.
- Airplane Mode. When active, it will turn off cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Can be a useful way of saving battery–especially in areas where signal strength is weak and your iPad is looking for a cell tower.
Continuing our same motion from Call-out Controls starting in the upper left and moving in a clock-wise direction are as follows
- iPod Controls. This is where we can control the playback of the song or podcast we might be listening to.
- Control Center Dismiss. Swiping in a downward motion on this symbol dismisses Control Center until we need to call upon it again.
- Brightness. Slider to control the brightness of the iPad screen
- Volume. Our volume control for anything playing back through the iPad speaker.
Identifying the final four controls moving in a clock-wise direction…
- AirDrop. This will allow you to share files and pictures between iOS devices and compatible Mac’s using a secure ad-hoc Bluetooth & Wi-Fi connection.
- Camera. This is a short-cut to launch the camera app.
- Timer. This will launch our iPad’s Timer, which will also give you access to the stop-watch, alarm and World Clock
- Air-Play. Selecting AirPlay will allow you to mirror your iPad’s screen to your Apple TV for viewing on a secondary screen.
Unfortunately, with the iPad we still don’t have access to a flashlight or a calculator in Control Center like the iPhone provides. To use these features on your iPad you will have to launch separate apps downloaded form the App Store. Luckily, there are countless options to choose from.
© Renkman for iPad Insight, 2015. |
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