Anybody who’s flown commercially in the past 10 years knows the drill: Just before the plane takes off, the cabin crew asks you to turn off your cellphone and electronic devices to avoid interfering with the plane’s own instruments. Once the captain says you can use your gadgets again, turn on your iPad and choose Settings→Airplane Mode→On. Why? Airplane Mode (signified by a tiny plane icon at the top of the iPad’s screen) conforms to federal regulations that prohibit wireless devices because their signals may interfere with the plane’s own instruments.

So switching Airplane Mode to On turns off your iPad’s link to the Internet and the ‘Pad’s GPS functions. However, you can still use the device to read downloaded iBooks, listen to music, type up Notes and documents, and do other non-Net activities.

“But wait,” you say, “many flights now have WiFi available on-board. What about that??” If the plane offers WiFi from Gogo Inflight (which has its own iPad app, by the way) or a similar service, go back to Settings→Wi-Fi and select On so you can override Airplane Mode’s WiFi blackout and join the plane’s wireless network; your iPad’s 3G network (the one that sends signals along cellphone towers) remains off via Airplane Mode. When the aircraft lands and you’re free to move about the cabin and off the plane, don’t forget to choose Settings→Airplane Mode→Off.

Tap Wi-Fi on the Settings screen to turn the iPad’s wireless networking chip on or off. If you’re outside a WiFi zone, turning WiFi off preserves battery life. If you’re in a WiFi zone with WiFi set to On, the iPad sniffs around for your usual set of airwaves. If it can’t find them, it lists any hot spots it does find and asks if you want to join one. Tap the name of a network to join it, or tap to see the network’s settings—or click “Forget this Network” to permanently remove it from your list of available networks. To turn off the message bugging you to join a new network, choose Settings→Wi-Fi→Ask to Join Networks→Off.

Certain applications, mainly social-networking programs, can push notifications to your iPad, even when you’re not actively using the program. This basically means that they flag you with a sound or text alert when someone does something like post a comment on your Facebook wall. You might also see a badge alert notification—a number in a little red circle on an app’s icon.

Push notifications can help keep you up-to-date, but all that notifying can run down your iPad’s battery—the slab has to constantly sniff the airways for notices. The notifications you get depend on the app, but to trigger them, tap Settings→Notifications→On, then tap the name of the application, and then choose how you want it to notify you, usually by Sound, Alert, or Badge.

Tap Location Services to On if you want the iPad to pinpoint your position on a map or supply information about where you are to certain location-aware applications (like restaurant finders). Tap it to Off if you don’t want to be found—or want to save some battery power (Location Services communicates with GPS satellites, cell towers, and WiFi hotspots).

With a Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, you can get on the Internet using a wireless network (WiFi), just as WiFi iPad owners can. But you can also tap into the Web via Verizon or AT&T’s 3G data network. Which one you use depends on which iPad you bought—a Verizon or AT&T model.

New owners of AT&T 3G iPads can choose from two plans. The cheapest one provides 250 megabytes of data for $15 a month. The other plan offers 2 gigabytes for $25 a month. (If you’re an original 3G iPad owner, you can still hang on to your original unlimited-data-for-$30-a-month plan.) Verizon has four monthly allowances: 1GB for $20, 3GB for $35, 5GB for $50, or 10GB for $80. You can find other options at Settings→Cellular, too. You can turn the 3G network off to save battery life. To see how much data you’ve used, upgrade your plan, add an international plan, or edit your payment information, tap the View Account button. If you’re on a foreign trip, you can turn off Data Roaming so your iPad’s not grabbing data over pricey international networks. AT&T iPad owners can add a PIN code to lock down the tablet’s micro-SIM card so others can’t use your tablet; just tap SIM PIN and pick a number. (Verizon iPads don’t use SIM cards, so they lack this feature.)

You really get no surprises here. Tapping Settings→Brightness & Wallpaper takes you to where you can a.) use a virtual slider to make the screen dimmer or brighter so it’s more comfortable on your eyes, and b.) select a new image to appear as the background wallpaper for both your iPad’s Lock Screen (the one you see when you wake the iPad from sleep but before you swipe the Unlock slider) and its Home screen (the screen where all your apps live).

Tap the Wallpaper label here to select new background images from either Apple’s stock shots or from a photo collection you added to the tablet (see Chapter 15 to learn how to do that). Tap a thumbnail photo to preview it, and then tap the button of your choice: Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, Set Both, or Cancel.

The iPad’s built-in Picture Frame feature (Turn the iPad into a Picture Frame) lets you show off your photo collection when you’re not using the tablet for other things. Tap Settings→Picture Frame to tell the iPad how to play the slideshow. You can choose the type of transition between images (the standard Dissolve or the fancier, animated Origami), whether you want the Picture Frame to zoom in on people’s faces, and if you want the iPad to shuffle your photos (randomly display them). Finally, you can pick which photos you want to appear. (Hint: It might be a good idea to leave those Las Vegas bachelorette party photos out if you know your mother is coming over for tea this afternoon.) To set up a regular photo-album slideshow, see Play Slideshows on Your iPad.

The collection of settings under “General” mostly affects the way the iPad itself works. When you tap Settings→General, you see a whole screen full of menus that change the way the iPad behaves. These include:

Settings for the Mail app hog much of the screen when you tap Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Still, you’re probably going to adjust your mail settings more often than your contacts or calendar settings.

For example, you come here to add new email accounts (or delete them), tell your iPad how often to fetch new messages, and change the look of the mail program in general. You can choose the number of messages from your accounts you want to see in the iPad’s Inbox (25 to 200 recent messages at a time) and have the inbox preview more or less of a message (one to five lines, or none at all).

You can change the font size to squint less, choose a default mail account if you have more than one, and change your Signature file—the standard bit of text that gets attached to the end of every outgoing message. You can also make the iPad ask you each time you want to delete messages, show (or hide) images in email, and show the To/Cc label to see if a message was addressed directly to you. Want to send a secret copy of a message to yourself? Turn on the Always Bcc Myself setting.

In the Contacts area, specify which way you want the iPad to sort and display people’s names—last name first and first name last, or the first name and then the last name. In the Calendars area, turn on your New Invitation Alert to have your iPad pipe up when someone sends you a meeting invitation, and also select a time zone for your calendar (useful if you live in New York but telecommute to the main office in San Francisco). Finally, you can pick a default calendar for your appointments if you have multiple calendars synced to the iPad.

The Settings area for the iPad’s Safari browser has many helpful buttons. Here, you can choose if you want your search results to come from Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and opt to have the Autofill feature fill in information automatically in web forms. Want to see your Bookmarks Bar at all times in the Safari window? Tap Settings→Safari→Always Show Bookmarks Bar→On to make it so. In the Security area of the Safari settings, you can help protect yourself when web surfing by turning on the Fraud Warning (which spots certain phishing sites out to rip off your personal information), enabling or disabling the JavaScript-powered interactive features some websites use (if you’re worried about security), blocking pop-up ads, and rejecting cookies from sites you don’t personally visit.

Tap Databases to see content Safari stores locally on your iPad (like files from Apple’s online iPad help guide). If Safari is acting sluggish or you want to erase your tracks, tap the buttons to clear the browser’s history, cookies, and cache files. Are you a web developer who wants to know why your web page is acting wiggy on iPad Safari? Tap Settings→Safari→Developer→Debug Console→On to get some help deciphering those page errors.

The iPod settings on the iPad include just four options. You can turn on the Sound Check feature, which smooths out the variable song volumes in a playlist into one fairly consistent sound level. Tap EQ to pick a preferred equalizer preset to make your music sound better. If you worry about hearing loss or damage from headphones full of loud music, tap Volume Limit to On and set a maximum audio level. And if you don’t want to see song lyrics or podcast info on-screen when listening to the iPad’s iPod, choose Settings→iPod→Lyrics & Podcast Info→Off. And you can turn the Home Sharing feature (Use iTunes Home Sharing on Your iPad) on or off here, too.

In the Video settings, you can opt to have the iPad bookmark the spot in a movie or TV show where you stop it so you can pick right up again when you come back to it. Just tap Settings→Videos→Start Playing→Where Left Off; you can also choose From Beginning if you want to always start the whole thing over again. If you have videos with Closed Captioning text descriptions embedded in the files, you can flip the Closed Captioning control On or Off. And when you’re funneling movies and TV shows off the iPad and onto the TV screen (Play iPad Videos on Your TV), you can flip the Widescreen button On to make sure the picture retains its original aspect ratio. Using the iPad with a TV in another country? Choose the TV Signal standard here: NTSC or PAL (Play iPad Videos on Your TV).

The iPad keeps a few settings for photo slideshows at Settings→Photos. You can choose the amount of time each picture stays on-screen, Repeat the slideshow over and over again automatically, and decide if you want to Shuffle the pictures into a different order from how they appear in your photo album.

Flip the On switch here to enable your iPad to make and take FaceTime video calls. You can also set up your preferred email address for use with FaceTime.

Hate the font the Notes app uses? Change between Noteworthy, Helvetica, and Marker Felt. You can also choose an email account to sync with Notes.

Tap the Store icon in the Settings list, then tap the View Account button if you need to see your address and billing information for the iTunes Store or App Store. You can also sign out of your account by tapping the Sign Out button.

Different apps may have application-specific settings as well. The iPad lists the ones that do under Apps in the Settings column. For example, you can change what the iBooks app does when you tap the left margin of the screen—you can go to the previous page or onward to the next page. Each app has different settings—and some don’t have any settings at all—but it’s worth a tap of the Settings icon to see what you can adjust.