The Files app is waaaaay better in iOS 13 and iPadOS. It adds external USB storage support, so you can plug in anything from a hard drive or USB-C stick to a synthesizer that can mount as a USB drive to load samples and presets.

Apple’s built-in file-management app adds column view (with a handy preview) and all the metadata you want to know about a given file. And it also benefits from a massively upgraded search feature.

The screenshot tool gets a radical makeover in iOS 13, and I’m not even talking about the fancy new toolbar for Apple Pencil markup. You can take advantage of two cool new features when you snap a screenshot in the upcoming version of iOS.

One, you can capture the entirety of a web page — not just what you can see on the screen right now, but all of it, from top to bottom, as if you’d stitched together lots of screenshots. Two, you can save these all-page screenshots as PDFs with active, selectable text and links.

Here’s how to make the most out of PDF screenshots in iOS 13.

In iOS 13 and iPadOS, Safari gets a download manager. If you tap (or click, with the new iOS mouse support) on a link to a file, that file will now get downloaded to a folder. What’s more, you can change the location of that download folder.

This is one of the small but essential new features in iPadOS that really turns the iPad into a viable MacBook replacement, even for those who aren’t yet used to the arcane ways of iOS. Let’s check it out.

The iPhone finally joined the dark side with the new Dark Mode feature introduced in iOS 13. Apple delighted fans who have been clamoring for the feature for years — and it appears the wait has been worth it.

After using Dark Mode, I don’t think I’ll be going back to the bright white iOS interface anytime soon. Apple poured a bunch of thought into Dark Mode so that it does more than just make everything black.

3D Touch is dead. Long live 3D Touch! Even though Apple removed the 3D Touch hardware from iPhone 11, the company resurrected the feature via Haptic Touch on its latest devices (just the way it mimicked it with iPhone XR). And now that iPadOS is here, that means 3D Touch is coming to iPads (in the form of a medium-long press).

In the new iPad version of iOS, you can long-ish press on an app icon, and it will pop up the same 3D Touch menu as you would find on an iPhone. Let’s see how it looks.

iPadOS 13 soups up its screenshot tool with the ability to capture an entire webpage as a PDF. That means it doesn’t just grab what you can see on the screen right now. If you’re viewing a webpage that’s really, really long, it will capture the whole thing, and turn it into a very tall PDF.

You can also mark up the resulting PDF before you save it to the Files app. This is a fantastic way to save a webpage, especially when you combine it with Reader View to remove the ads, sidebars and other junk first.

Let’s see how to use it.

In iOS 13 and iPadOS, Apple rejigged the text-selection engine and the cut/copy/paste tools. And they’re amazing. For the last 10 years, selecting and manipulating text has been a frustrating nightmare on the iPad. Try to select a couple of words in Safari, for instance — a package delivery tracking number, for instance — and the selection would bounce back and forth between a few characters and the entire page.

It was enough to drive you back to the comfort of the Mac’s mouse pointer.

In iOS 13, though, this all changes. Text selection is accurate and predictable. And the new copy/paste gesture shortcuts become second nature almost immediately.

In the next version of iOS, the iPad will be able to open several “copies” of the same app. You can then switch between them, treating them just like any other individual apps, or you can combine these instances with other apps.

For example: You could have one “space” with your Mail app and your to-do app in a 50:50 Split View. And then you can have another space with a different instance of your Mail app and, for instance, the Notes app. Each version of the Mail app can show a different folder or message.

You can even have two versions of, say, the Maps app, sharing the same screen, showing totally different places. It’s a powerful addition to iPad multitasking. Let’s see it in action.

In iOS 13, you can share songs and watch movies with a friend, with each of you using your own AirPods. The new feature is called Audio Sharing, and it lets you instantly — and temporarily — pair a second set of AirPods to your iPhone or iPad. It’s like the olde schoole method of using a headphone splitter to plug two sets of headphones into one jack socket, only way more expensive and fancy.

Here’s how to use it.

Apple’s Reminders app gets a massive update in iPadOS and iOS 13. It’s no longer a joke app that needs a million taps just to set a notification time on your action item. We already know about the new layout, which splits tasks into Today, Scheduled, All and Lists, and we also know about the excellent new natural-language input, which makes typing a reminder as easy as dictating it to Siri.

But the big update also brings some other new features you likely haven’t heard about yet: Today Notifications and Type to Siri (right there in the Spotlight screen).