Club Benefits
If you or someone you love just came into possession of a new iPad, congratulations! I've been reviewing tablets for ages here at Tom's Guide, and I feel like Apple's iPads are among the best tablets on the market right now. They're light and long-lasting, with lovely touchscreens and enough speed to run any app in Apple's massive App Store.
They make for great gifts, but the iPad interface is so minimal and intuitive that there's a slew of useful features you might take months to find if you didn't know about them. With that in mind, I figured I could quickly help you make your new iPad your own by walking you through my 5 favorite iPad features you should master to make the most of your new tablet.
Customize your home screen
As you swipe around your home screen, you'll see all the apps you've downloaded lined up in neat little rows. You can let your iPad manage all this automatically, but if you'd like to customize your home screen, there's an easy (yet oddly hard to find) way to do so.
To start customizing your home screen, simply press and hold your finger on any empty space on your tablet's home screen until you see the icons start to shake. At this point, you can tap and drag them around to reorganize them, but you can do a lot more than that if you hit that tiny "Edit" button in the upper-left corner of the screen.
I can't tell you how many times I've had family tell me they never even saw that button, because it's awfully tiny. But if you tap and hold the home screen until the icons start to jiggle and then hit the Edit button, you can do a lot more: change your wallpaper, adjust your light/dark mode settings and lay down Widgets on your home screen.
Don't know about Widgets? You will soon!
Lay down some Widgets
Widgets are blocks you can put on your home screen that will display useful information and update in real time. They debuted with iPadOS 17 a few years ago, and now they're really robust and useful.
To start putting Widgets on your home screen, you just hold your finger on an empty space until you enter edit mode (when the icons start jiggling) and then hit the Edit button in the top-left corner.
That will open the Widgets menu, where you'll see a big list of apps you have that you can scroll through to pick out Widgets. Apple's apps have great Widget support with lots of options, but nowadays, many third-party apps do too. You can also put active Widgets on your iPad's lock screen, so you can stay on top of key details like your calendar or to-do list even when your iPad is locked.
Turn on "Find My iPad"
Next, let's ensure you have a little peace of mind if you ever misplace your iPad or leave it somewhere.
Apple has a robust tracking system in the form of "Find My", an app that you can use to track the location of your enrolled Apple devices in real time. It's super useful, but a lot of new iPad users don't even know it exists.
To enable Find My for your iPad, open the Settings app, then tap your name in the upper-left corner. Navigate to the Find My menu and make sure the "Find My iPad" setting is turned on. From within this menu, you can also choose to share your iPad's location with family and friends.
Master multitasking
Your iPad is great for focusing on a specific app or task, but there are some advanced multitasking features you can use to access multiple apps simultaneously. I love doing this when I need to reference something while working or if I want to chat with a friend while watching something, and I think you will too.
The trick is finding and mastering these tools, because they're not well-explained if you don't dig into Apple's guides and menus. To access your iPad's multitasking settings, open the Settings app and navigate to the Multitasking & Gestures submenu.
From here, you can (at least as of iPadOS 26) pick and choose one of three different ways to multitask. The "Full Screen Apps" setting is the default and also the most restrictive, as you can only view one app at a time in full-screen mode. So basically, you can only multitask by quickly switching between apps.
The second "Windowed Apps" option makes your iPad work a bit more like a Mac or a Windows PC. When working in this multitasking mode, you can have multiple apps open on your screen at once, and you can change their size or move them by tapping and dragging on the corners of the app.
The final option is "Stage Manager," and it's something totally unique to your iPad. When working in Stage Manager mode, you can center one app on your iPad while the other open apps are listed as small icons along the side of the screen. When you want to switch apps, you just tap the icon of the app you want to look at, and it immediately leaps to the fore. Check out our how to use Stage Manager on iPad guide for step-by-step instructions and more tips!
Make your Control Center your own
There's a really useful Control Center menu built into your iPad that you can customize so it has just the controls you really want, and none that you don't. But if you didn't know where to look, you might take a while to even realize it exists.
See, to access the Control Center, you have to drag your finger down from the upper-right corner of your iPad. It can take a few tries to get it right and stop pulling down the notifications pane by accident (which happens if you drag your finger down from the top of the screen elsewhere), but once you get the hang of it, summoning the Control Center gives you quick access to useful features like volume and Wi-Fi controls, your music library, your smart home settings and more.
You can customize your Control Center by dragging your finger down from the upper-right corner to summon it and then tapping the small plus (+) icon in the upper-left corner of the menu. This will turn on editing mode, and you can then tap and drag controls around to reorganize your Control Center. You can also tap the minus (-) icon to remove a control, or tap the thick edge of the control and drag it to change the size of the control.
Once I got the hang of using the Command Center, it became my go-to tool for quickly doing things like playing music or turning on smart lights in my apartment. I hope you find it equally useful!
Master these five sometimes hard-to-find features, and you're well on your way to making your new iPad your own. I hope you found these tips useful, and if you have your own advice for new iPad owners, share it in the comments below!
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