I’ve been a happy iPad owner since day one. Even as the first version of the device, it’s well refined, useful, fast, a beautiful screen and has a battery life that doesn’t quit. It’s not without some issues, most notably the is the wifi connection bug. It seems about once every other day I’ll lose my wifi connection (mid-use) and have to open the settings and re-connect. It also get’s poor wifi reception compared to my Macbook and iPhone.
Overall, it’s made reading and consuming information much more pleasurable than holding a laptop or staring at a tiny phone screen when lounging around the house or riding in a car.
Here’s a review of the apps that I’ve been enjoying on the iPad for that past couple weeks:
GoodReader – $.99 – Want to read your PDF’s on the iPad? I have a fair amount of books in PDF format that I wanted to read on my iPad. This utility is great at getting your PDFs onto the iPad by either the file transfer via iTunes, or my favorite, via network using your Dropbox account. The actual reader interface needs some improvement, better page turning, and the overall interface is a little buggy.
Instapaper Pro – $4.99 – This is my go-to app when laying in bed. Instapaper is simple way to mark an item you want to read later (via a browser bookmarklet) on your desktop machine. You then sync your “read later” items into Instapaper on the iPhone or iPad for easy to read text versions of the page, available for offline viewing. I’ve used this app a ton on my iPhone, but with the larger screen on the iPad, this app makes reading articles a pleasure. Bonus that the iPad app is free for iPhone Pro users as they made the same app dual-compatible. I also like that many twitter clients and rss readers integrate with a “sent to Instapaper” option.
AirVideo – $2.99 – This beauty let’s me stream those 100′s of .mkv movies I have on our Media center PC over my local network. You need to install an app on the server machine, then you can see your video folder. There’s the option to “Play with live conversion” or you can set a queue to convert your videos to iPad compatible format, which will stream via this app, or you can copy into iTunes to transfer onto the iPad. The live conversion works good if your server machine is a decent and you’re getting good wifi reception. Otherwise you get buffering, but have the option to set the quality to lower if you have problems. Awesome app!
NetNewsWire – $9.99 – The best RSS feed reader on the mac that syncs with your Google Reader account. The iphone app wasn’t great, but this iPad app is quite good. Simple, easy to use, fast. Definitely missing a “Mark item as unread” option.
Things – $19.99 – My tool for managing my tasks. Fantastic desktop app, great iPhone app and now the best of all, the iPad app. Beautiful design to a concept and interface that makes creating logging and managing your to-dos a pleasure. As much as I love this app there are two major downsides: no cloud-based syncing and the price. The wifi direct sync to the desktop app requires all devices to be open to sync, it’s hokey. The desktop app is $50 and iPad app $20, but I suppose you pay for quality. I just hope they don’t charge for the update that adds cloud sync.
1Password – $6.99 – An invaluable app on the desktop to manage and save passwords. With as much use I get from the iPad browser, having all my passwords right there is fantastic. I just wish I could populate my passwords in the native Safari browser (rather than the in-app browser), as the in-app browser is quite limited, like you can’t bookmark sites or save images.
Plants vs. Zombies HD – $9.99 – I got sucked into this game. Don’t buy unless you want to spend countless hours shooting zombies with peas. Awesome graphics, sound and really fun gameplay with some strategy.
Twitterific – free – A decent twitter app but I expect better options to be available soon from Echofon or Tweetie (which is now Twitter for iPhone/iPad, purchased by Twitter).
Safari – native – Very impressive. With the exception of missing the Flash player, this browser is a pleasure to use and easy to read and interact with almost any website I’ve visited.
Nice review. Thanks.
Have you tried Opera for iPhone/iPad yet? What are your thoughts on that?
I have tried Opera. I’m glad Apple is allowing browser competition, so this is a good first attempt, but not at all up to par with the native Safari browser. Would need to be an improvement on Safari before I would use it.
This is a great post, I stumbled across your article while looking for some downloads. Thanks for sharing, I’ll be sure to recommend this site to others.
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