iPads seem to arouse quite a bit of interest here, so I thought I’d let you know what I, as a new iPad person, currently have on the machine.
The picture is screenshot of the home page of my iPad. If you look at the bottom line you will see that I’ve re-arranged the “standard” icons that show up on every page (I done a similar thing on my iPhone). From list to right I have Safari, a bookmark link to TeleRead, the Kindle application, TweetDeck and Mail. I am of two minds about using the built-in mail. It’s rather clunky and on my iPhone I have, in place of it, a bookmark link to Gmail. However the built-in mail application lets me have hard copy if I’m not at a WiFi connection.
On the rest of the home page are:
the default Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Maps and Settings apps. Then I have The Spectator app, which is just a joy to use and now has all the wonderful Spectator cartoons; BBC News, the best news source on the planet, the NPR app; Newspapers, an app that gets you to the home page of hundreds of newspapers; Google; a bookmark link to the best weather site if you are into weather details, WeatherUnderground; the Apple Pages word processor, haven’t used it much yet; PCalc, a fantastic, if expensive, RPN calculator. I’m stuck in Reverse Polish and have a hard time figuring out how to use a regular calculator; NewsRack, its the only RSS reader I’ve found for the iPad that doesn’t crash on a regular basis; the WordPress blog application; and Weather Underground’s great WunderMap. As you can see I still have room on the front page.
This is the second page.
Netflix, works like a charm; Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, it’s not full screen but that isn’t necessary with this app; the same with the IMDB app that follows; Pocket Tunes, probably the best streaming radio app out there. It has an excellent built-in database of thousands of radio stations; WunderRadio, another good streaming internet radio application, though I think Pocket Tunes is better; Last.fm and Pandora, of course. Lastfm is better in some ways in that it doesn’t repeat as much as Pandora. I have paid subscriptions to both; Kobo Reader, haven’t used it yet; iBooks, haven’t used it yet; Merriam Webster Unabridged Dictionary, not full screen but it’s not necessary; three more dictionaries, Chambers, Advanced English Dictionary and Dictionary.com. The later is free and comes from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary and does run full screen; NowPlaying is the best app I’ve found for checking out movie theaters; Units, a converter; the Amazon app, dangerous!; Yelp, of course; Dropbox, which can be very useful; GoodReader, haven’t used it yet; and Boingo WiFi, which works very well.
The third page is for card-type games.
4Corners, Acid Solitaire and Kings Corners are all full screen apps. Acid Solitaire, by Red Mercury, will take you back to your Palm days, as Red Mercury came out with some of the best Palm card games around. 4 Corners is from Seahorse Software, who was also a staple of the Palm days. Blackjack Run and Pyramid are Seahorse Software games, but they are not native iPad apps. They look OK, however, running pixel doubled. The final two, Shanghai and Moonlight Mahjong, will take your breath away. They are full screen versions of the iPhone apps and look absolutely stunning on the iPad.
The fourth page is for word games.
Unfortunately, none of these are native iPad apps so they are not full screen. I doesn’t really matter, though, given the type of games that they are.
Word Warp and Word Warp X, if you like Word Warp you should check for the brand new X version; Chicktionary, which is cute; Lexitron, which is a timed game that will get your blood running; Fire Words; WordPop, which is another game that made its name in the heyday of the Palm; WordFu and Wurdle; and, of course, Bookworm, which is another Palm graduate and still may be one of the best around – if it only weren’t for its bowdlerized dictionary.
The final page is used for apps that I have no interest in but can’t delete, only use infrequently, or want to keep around just in case.
The are YouTube; a bookmark link to my Gmail account, I vaccilate back and forth between the Apple native mail app and just using the browser; iPod, all my music is handled from my iPhone and I have no interest in putting any on the iPad since I always have the iPhone with me; App Store; Videos, I have Netflix so who cares about this; Photos, no reason to keep photos on the iPad, I don’t have any on my iPhone either; and iTunes, since I have no music on the iPad I don’t need it.
So that’s it. I have a lot more stuff on my iPhone, but these, so far, are the apps that seem relevant to iPad use.
It will be really nice when version 4.0 of the software comes out so that a lot of this stuff can be organized into folders, both on the iPad and the iPhone.
Thanks for sharing. I’ll have to take a look at some of those apps.
I like to use the free weather.com app. It takes advantage of the large screen in a very smart way.
How did you take the screenshot?!?!?! I looked for a screenshot app but could not find one!
I like the BBC app but is is very very VERY limited content-wise, unfortunately, so I get way more info just going to their website.
Screenshots are made the same way as the iPhone: hold down the top “on/off” button and while holding press and release the “home” button, then release the top button. The screen will flash and you will have a screenshot in the Photos app.
I won’t be buying an iPad until August (long story), but my choice of apps will be based on my year’s experience with an iPod. I wound up regularly using only a few apps on it, and will forgo the others on the iPad. The hard part will be choosing additional apps that are completely new versions which take advantage of the iPad’s acreage.
Just remember that iPhone/iPod apps move over to the iPad automatically. That is, you don’t have to purchase them again. Many of them will be rewritten to work on both platforms, i.e., “normal” on the iphone and full screen on the ipad.
It seems your “word games” page is missing out on a real iPad gem, “Deduce”. It’s not very well-known yet, but it will be! (read the reviews).