Settings That Control How Your iPad Looks and Sounds
You probably want to customize the look of your iPad by changing the wallpaper and adjusting the brightness of the screen. You also might want to make changes to your audio alerts.
Brighten your screen
Who doesn’t want a bright, vibrant screen? Alas, the brightest screens exact a trade-off: Before you drag the brightness slider to the max, remember that brighter screens sap the life from your battery more quickly. The control appears when Brightness & Wallpaper is highlighted.
Tap the Auto-Brightness control so that it’s on. The control automatically adjusts the screen according to the lighting environment in which you’re using the iPad while at the same time being considerate of your battery.
Change the wallpaper
Choosing wallpaper is a neat way to dress up the iPad according to your aesthetic preferences. You can sample the pretty patterns and designs that the iPad has already chosen for you as follows:
Tap Brightness & Wallpaper and then tap the two iPads below the word Wallpaper.)
A list of photo albums appears with Wallpaper, a photo album of lovely images included with your iPad.
Tap Wallpaper or one of your own photo albums in the list.
Thumbnails of the images in that album appear.
Tap a thumbnail image.
That image fills the screen.
When an image is full-screen, choose one of the options that appear at the top of the screen:
Set Lock Screen makes your selected image the wallpaper of choice when the iPad is locked.
Set Home Screen makes the wallpaper decorate only your Home screen.
Set Both makes your image the wallpaper for locked and Home screens.
Cancel takes you back to the thumbnail page without changing your Home or Lock Screen.
From Settings, you can also turn your iPad into an animated picture frame.
Your iPad's Sounds settings
Consider the Sounds settings area the iPad’s soundstage. There, you can turn audio alerts on or off for a variety of functions: new e-mail, sent mail, calendar and reminder alerts, Facebook posts, and tweets. You can also decide whether you want to hear lock sounds and keyboard clicks.
On the iPad 2 or third-generation iPad, you can alter the ringtone you hear for FaceTime calls and the text tones you hear for iMessages, and tap a button and visit the iTunes store to buy more text tones or ringtones if you’re not satisfied with those that Apple supplies, for 99 cents and $1.29 a pop, respectively. (Mac owners can create their own by using GarageBand.)
To set a custom tone for individuals in the Contacts app, tap the Edit button and then either the Ringtone or Text Tone option.
To raise the decibel level of alerts, drag the volume slider to the right. Drag in the opposite direction to bring down the noise. An alternative way to adjust sound levels is to use the physical Volume buttons on the side of the iPad for this purpose, as long as you’re not already using the iPad’s iPod to listen to music or watch video.
You can enable and disable this feature with the Change with Buttons switch, right below the volume slider.
