10 iPad Pro Features That Will Change How You Use Your Tablet

Ever since Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" first lit up living rooms around the world with visions of the Starship Enterprise, people have dreamed of a day when that fiction becomes reality. Who wouldn't want to live in a world with high-speed interplanetary travel, instant short-range transportation, and sleek touchscreen computing at your fingertips? So far, we haven't figured out interplanetary travel or transporters, but we did manage tablet computing.

Tablets feel so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget it's been little more than a decade since most of us got our hands on one. Apple certainly wasn't the first company to try their hand at a tablet — those efforts stretch back at least as far as the late '80s and Hindsight's prototype Letterbug computer — but Apple succeeded in energizing the market in a way no one had before. Riding the momentum of the first iPhone just three years earlier, Apple's first iPad hit shelves with a level of fanfare that made it an instant success. Today, a little more than half of all tablets purchased in the United States are iPads.

If you've got your hands on an iPad Pro, you're looking at a lot of cool functionality right out of the box and readily available on the surface. Then there are other features, not quite hidden but also not immediately apparent, which can take your tablet time to the next level.

Your iPad is capable of housing just about everything you need for work time and play time. It's convenient, but it also means that every once in a while, your leisure time is interrupted by something urgent. Say you're watching a movie and a notification pops up. You see that it's an important email that needs a quick response. It won't take long, so you pause your movie and exit out of its app. Go back to your home screen, open up your email ... and so on. It's not the biggest problem in the world but it's annoying, and it's fixable.

Your iPad's Picture in Picture feature lets you shrink a video down into a smaller window that floats over the top of whatever else you need to do. To activate it while watching a video, tap your screen and look for the shrink icon. It looks like a large white rectangle with an arrow pointing to a smaller gray rectangle.

Now you can answer emails, pay bills, look something up, or just surf the web without ever having to pause your movie. You can also manipulate the floating window to resize it, move it to another position on your screen, or return to full screen when you're ready.

On a desktop or laptop, moving content from one application to another is pretty effortless, thanks to the combined power of the keyboard and mouse. Is there anything they can't do? Maneuvering content around on a tablet, however, isn't quite as simple or intuitive. Fortunately, your iPad Pro is capable of dragging and dropping content across apps using nothing more than your touchscreen.

Start by opening the apps you need in Split View or Slide Over. If you're copying something from a website into a text, put one on the left and one on the right. You get the drill. Before you can Drag and Drop, your iPad needs to know what it needs to move. For images, press and hold until you see it "lift up." If there's a sort of shimmer around the image, you're good to go. If you're working with text, you'll have to highlight it before you press and hold.

Once you're shimmering, slide your lassoed content from one app to the other and drop it in its new home. Your computer's Copy and Paste procedure is tried and true, but it doesn't look and feel like a magic trick. Sometimes change is a good thing.

Thanks to technologies like DocuSign, signing and returning important documents is a lot more convenient than it once was. But every now and again, you might be called upon to physically sign a document and return it. The tried and true method is to print the document out, sign it in pen, then scan it and return it. It gets the job done, but it's needlessly laborious at this point in our ongoing technological revolution.

You've got a few options for scanning, signing, and sending documents with your iPad Pro. If you have a physical document, you could sign it with a pen and scan the signed document or you could scan it unmarred and sign the digital replica. If you've been sent a digital document, you can sign and send it back without ever involving the physical realm.

In the Notes app, tap the camera button, then tap the Scan Documents icon — It looks like a printed page with a dotted box around it — and point your camera at the document you want to sign. If your iPad is set to Auto mode, it will scan automatically as soon as it detects something scannable. Otherwise, hit the Shutter icon to scan. To sign, tap the Share button and select the Markup icon (looks like the tip of a pen). Write your signature with your finger or Apple Pencil and send it off. You can also save that signature and stamp it onto documents in the future.

The familiar Notes app is great for dedicated writing sessions, themed lists, and writing down all of the things you swear you'll remember but immediately forget. Sometimes, however, you're in the middle of doing something when you have an idea or learn something interesting. Rather than stop what you're doing, open an entirely separate app, and write down your thoughts, use Quick Note.

It does exactly what the name suggests, provides you with a place to make quick notes without interrupting whatever else you're doing. The quickest way to open Quick Note on your iPad Pro is swiping up from the bottom right corner of the screen. You can also get there by clicking the share button in any app and then tapping Add to Quick Note. You can quickly write down your thoughts, tap done, and you'll be automatically returned to what you were doing before.

Quick Note works over the top of any app or screen on your iPad and, unlike other notetaking solutions, it reminds you of your notes at relevant times. For instance, if you copy text or a URL into a Quick Note, you'll see a reminder prompt the next time you visit that site, taking you right back to your previous notes.

Beginning in 2020, Apple's introduced a number of new features to the iPad Pro. In addition to improved cameras and onboard microphones, your device comes standard with a depth-sensing LiDAR scanner. We got into the nitty gritty of how LiDAR works, but the long and the short of it is a LiDAR instrument sends a beam of light into the environment and measures the time it takes for the light to bounce back and hit a sensor. Because the speed of light is constant, the transit time corresponds with distance. If you send out a whole lot of photons in different directions and measure their return times, you can start to build a pretty accurate 3D map of almost anything.

The LiDAR camera works at a distance of roughly 5 meters and provides photon-level detail almost instantly. The most immediately actionable way to use LiDAR on your iPad is through the Measure app. When the app was introduced, it used augmented reality to calibrate its environment and make estimates of objects or spaces. With LiDAR, the algorithm is replaced by direct measurements of bouncing photons, happening inside your iPad in real-time. The upshot is that you get more reliable measurements for rearranging rooms or DIY projects. But why should it stop there? Considering the rise of affordable 3D printers, nothing's stopping you from making a tiny version of your house and all of your things to play with.