Apple’s iOS 11 Helps iPads Catch Up With Ultrabooks, Surface Tablets

Wayne Rash,

ANALYSIS: The new version of Apple’s mobile operating system is a useful upgrade for the iPhone, but it also adds significant capabilities to the iPad

So you won’t get the new capabilities for Pencil support that come with the iPad Pro, including Instant Markup and Instant Notes.

Instant Markup lets you use the Apple Pencil to annotate and otherwise markup screen images, including PDF files and photos simply by writing on them. Whatever you write will go with the item you were marking up.

Instant Notes happen when you touch the Apple Pencil to the lock screen, which opens a note screen. You can write notes in the screen, and they’re searchable.

iPad iOS 11 2

Apple pencil

There are some lesser known changes that should make life a little easier for those who have to support iOS devices. For example, you no longer have to maintain a printed recovery key for each device in case the user forgets a password. Instead, Apple has fully implemented two-factor authentication for iOS, which you’ll discover when you first install the new version of iOS.

There’s also a document scanning feature that senses when the camera is photographing a document. In this case it will straighten up the image and remove glare. You can even use the Apple Pencil to fill in blanks and sign the document. This feature alone will make some types of document routing significantly easier.

If you’d rather type than sign, the new on-screen keyboard now has dual function keys which allow you to type the alternate character on the key by just flicking it down. Remember the shift key on your old typewriter? It’s back in this new version.

Improved in this version is the iOS Control Center. This is the feature that you’ve used to do things such as turning Bluetooth or WiFi on or off, enabling rotation lock or changing the screen brightness. Now the Control Center has been redesigned so you can customize it by adding or deleting functions that work best for you.

 There’s one glitch, though. Turning Bluetooth or WiFi on or off in the Control Center doesn’t actually turn those off functions. They’re still running, but they won’t accept new connections. If you actually want to turn those functions on or off, you need to do it in the Settings app or you need to enable Airplane Mode in Settings or in the Control Center.
 

For Apple, the improvements to iOS for the iPad will help make this tablet a more valuable tool for its customers. The iPad has been a slow seller recently, likely because it was hard to see its value when compared with the Plus versions of the iPhone.

Now, with the new features, the new iOS makes the iPad more useful. But it also adds to the iPhone’s functionality.

Originally published on eWeek

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