I'm using the iPad 2's 10 Watt wall charger and wireless sync, and it works very well. The only thing that kept bothering me was how to tell how much the battery was charged without unplugging it.

Here's how: If you have the iPad's screen locked, press and hold the Home button. After a few seconds the battery charge percentage will show up next to the 'Charging' icon in the top right of the screen.

[crarko adds: I tried this with a first-generation iPad and it did nothing. However, going to Settings » General » Usage and turning on the 'Battery Percentage' slider makes the charging level always visible. Does the iPad 2 behave differently?]

There is no easy way to mass delete some (but not all) photos from the Camera Roll from the iPhone. Here is the solution I found.

Before iOS5, I'd never used the iTunes app to sync my photos. Instead, I've used the highly rated app called PhotoSync (wireless sync for iPhoto/iPhone). When doing this, my iPhone collected many photos, all 1561 of them and never deleted them. The solution was to mount the iPhone as a camera in Apple's Image Capture application. This allowed me to select my 1000 photos I didn't want and delete them with ease.

[crarko adds: Once again, Image Capture comes to the rescue. Note that iPhoto will either let you keep or delete all the images on an import, but doesn't give much choice beyond that.]

If you use Find My Friends, you can ask Siri to locate your friends for you.

Simply say 'find my friends' to locate friends near you. You can also ask for friends by name, saying 'find [friend name].' This also works with relationships, like 'find my wife.'

To top it all off, you can say 'hide me from my friends' to hide your current location—great for last minute holiday shopping trips!

[crarko adds: Yet another example of the wonders of Siri. My prediction is that the next version will be enabled to shop for you, at least in iTunes, the iBookstore and the App Store.]

Sometimes, you use words in other languages so often that as convenient as it already is, it's still a hassle to switch keyboards.

But you can use the keyboard shortcut for such words. It's faster and doesn't break your flow. Like so.

Also useful for special characters.

[crarko adds: I know we've had hints about using this for special characters before, but this seems to illustrate the idea of what this feature was designed for perfectly.]

Here's a piece of new functionality with iOS 5 Weather app.

The Weather app doesnt look like it has changed much, but when looking at the forecast for the week, tap and pull down below a day and it will give an hourly forecast.

[crarko adds: Hey, that's pretty cool. I hadn't noticed this before.]

iOS 5 introduced Private Browsing, which can be set via Settings » Safari.

To tell whether you have Private Browsing turned on when using Safari on an iOS device, the chrome around the browser window will be black. When Private Browsing is turned off, it's the standard bluish-gray.

[crarko adds: A useful find, and I admit I hadn't noticed the addition. I always used a third party browser if I wanted this feature.]

The old tap and drag to mass select photos has been reassigned to rearranging photos. So it isn't obvious how to select large groups of photos anymore. Many people have commented on the Apple Discussion Forums having trouble with this.

The new method is simple but not so intuitive. Just use two fingers, close together to tap on a photo, hold for a second and then drag across all the photos you want to select.

It works just like the old method, just needs two fingers instead of one.

[crarko adds: I tried this with the iPhone but I think you'd need far smaller fingers than mine to do this.]

After a quick Google search (as well as on macosxhints.com), I'm sharing this feature I discovered by accident. If your iOS 5 device is locked and you receive a notification, you can swipe the notification instead of the 'Slide to Unlock' widget, and you will be automatically directed to the related app. If you have a passcode, you'll still be prompted to enter it.

I've tested this on the following devices:

• iPhone 4 with iOS 5.0.1
• iPhone 3GS with iOS 5.0
• iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 in both portrait and landscape mode

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described.]

Sometimes when I browse through the web on my iPad, I need to know todays date.

Unfortunately, iOS 5 has no way to show the date without quitting the current app to have a look at the Calendars icon. As there is no jailbreak yet for iOS 5 on iPad2 I was looking how this could be achieved using the Notification Center in iOS 5.

You need to create a new iCloud calendar which has an all-day event for everyday which tells the current date. Of course, this is a tedious task if you need to create an event for everyday.

So I made an AppleScript where you can select a range of dates for which those events will be created.

By default it creates the Events in an calendar called 'Todayis.' Please create this Calendar on iCloud before running the app, or your new calendar will end up on your Mac. The name of the calendar can be changed if you want to add the events to your default calendar. You will be prompted for a calendar name when running the script.

This should work as well on the iPhone, but I have no iOS5 capable phone to hand.

The download for the script is here.

[crarko adds: I tested the script using a shared Mobile Me calendar, and it works that way as well. It also is good on the iPhone, as expected. One caveat is that the script download is runtime only, so the script source is not available. Also, when the script is run it ends by sending you to a donation web page. This is just voluntary, but if that sort of thing annoys you you may wish to create your own script.]

I stumbled upon this while dictating a text message to my daughter. You can use Siri on iPhone 4s to dictate emoticons in your text! I even tested this in the Notes app, so very likely this will work anywhere text can be dictated. Here are the basic ones I was able to use.

• :-) = 'Smiley face.'
• ;-) = 'Winky face.'
• :-( = 'Sad Face.'

Can anyone determine any others? I wasn't able to get 'Tongue Face' to work.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. Hopefully Siri will never learn LOL-speech.]