Category — Factoids

Chris Foresman of Ars Technica writes about how the Star Trek PADD (Personal Access Display Device) prefigured the iPad of today. In the process, he interviews a number of people who worked on the various Star Trek series and movies.

For example, here’s scenic art supervisor, Michael Okuda, who worked on almost every Trek series: “There are a lot of things that are very easy to do in a prop, but actually very difficult to do in reality. For example, pinch to zoom—that was relatively difficult to do even as a visual effect. It’s implemented brilliantly on the iPad and the iPhone.”

It’s worth a read if you like Star Trek and iPads. (And we do.)

The conventional wisdom used to be that, to prolong battery life for portable devices, one should periodically (say, once a month) run the battery all the way down and then charge it all the way up. But battery life really isn’t why you may want to do a full discharge/recharge cycle periodically on your iPad.

Here’s what Apple says about the lithium-ion polymer battery used in the iPad:

Lithium-ion polymer batteries pack in a higher power density than nickel-based batteries. This gives you a longer battery life in a lighter package, as lithium is the lightest metal. You can also recharge a lithium-ion polymer battery whenever convenient, without the full charge or discharge cycle necessary to keep nickel-based batteries at peak performance.

Instead, the real reason to engage in a complete discharge/recharge cycle is to make sure that your iPad’s battery indicator is reporting the charge correctly:

For proper reporting of the battery’s state of charge, be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).

If your iPad charge indicator seems to be accurate, you don’t need to engage in battery charge-cycle voodoo: top off the charge whenever you like.

I probably saw this somewhere in the “Getting Started” document, but forgot. If you want to see the menu bar toolbar in Pages, you need to rotate to Portrait.

May 13, 2010 Update: With the update Apple released today, the Pages iPad app now shows the toolbar in both orientations. —MEC