You’ve just spent a boatload of money on Apple’s new iPad and now the time has come to show it off to friends and family. They expect to be impressed and wowed, so you had better deliver a quality presentation that really shows off its various strengths. What follows are 12 excellent apps covering a wide-range of areas, from games to utilities, that should do an excellent job in justifying your new technological wonder.
Warpgate HD
If you’re old enough to remember the glory days of space-trading sims like Elite and Privateer, then you’ll feel right at home with Warpgate HD. This is a beautifully realized, very polished real-time space exploration, combat and trading game offering a mammoth universe, tons of combat, excellent graphics, great sounds and oodles of missions. Warpgate will show off the processing-power of your iPad as well as its brilliant use of touch-controls to navigate the streamlined interface.
Warpgate HD is $7.99 on iTunes.
Pocket Legends
I’ve probably put more time into Pocket Legends than any other game currently available for the iPad. This is an excellent game that will remind many of Diablo, featuring 3D graphics that are lush with details, fast-paced gameplay and seamless multiplayer. If you thought you’d never see an MMO on the iPad, then Pocket Legends explodes that theory and promises a great future for the genre. Pocket Legends is free to download and play, though you won’t be able to progress past level 13 unless you pay $1.99 for an expansion pack.
Pocket Legends is Free on iTunes
Words With Friends
Words With Friends won’t impress from a technical standpoint, but it will illustrate one of the many strong-points of the iPad, namely turn-based multiplayer games that you can pick up and play at any moment. Words With Friends is basically Scrabble with a different name, but the game is essentially the same. However, one big selling point that Words with Friends has over its competitor, EA’s Scrabble, is that you can have 20 concurrent games running at any time. Once you dive into the world of Words with Friends you will become hopelessly addicted.
Words With Friends is $2.99 on iTunes
Brushes/Sketchbook Pro/ArtStudio
One area where the iPad really shines and has no equal is the wonderful library of artistic applications. There are several choices available, depending on your needs and existing skills.
Brushes is a great place to start, though compared to its competitors, you’ll find it lacking in many features. However, Brushes allows for high-resolution export, which is a critical consideration for many artists.
Sketchbook Pro has the most features of all the art programs, tons of brushes and a very effective interface. If you need more options than Brushes, you simply can’t go wrong with Sketchbook Pro.
ArtStudio is another excellent app, the cheapest on offer at only 99-cents, which is a total steal. ArtStudio falls somewhere between Brushes and Sketchbook Pro in terms of features, has a great minimal interface and is a worthy option. You can’t beat the price.
Sketchbook Pro is $7.99 on iTunes
Pandora
Pandora is a well-known music streaming service that offers tons of free tracks based on your tastes. The interface is slick, easy to navigate and a pleasure to use. Steaming is fast and responsive. You also can’t beat the price, since its free!
Air Video
Air Video is a revelation! This little app will stream any and all video formats on your PC or MAC to your iPad, converting video on the fly for seamless transmission. I threw some pretty obscure formats at this thing and it worked wonders. It worked better than PS3 Media Server, better than TVersity and better than the Xbox 360 as a media streamer. All you do is download a free program for either PC or MAC that runs a server on your system. Once you have the app running on your iPad, the two hook up as if by magic. Very little setup required. This thing just flat-out works.
A free version is available for testing.
Twitterific
There is no shortage of Twitter-apps for the iPad, some free, some expensive, some useless. Since my Twitter needs are on the slight side, I have opted to use Twitterific since it is free and, more importantly, effective at what it does. A crisp display reveals all incoming tweets and users can create custom lists and searches.
Star Walk
This app isn’t for everyone, but it sure is impressive and a real showcase for the capabilities of the iPad. Star Walk is a portable telescope of sorts. The real magic happens when you hold the iPad up to the night sky and it automatically reveals the names and pertinent information, including diagrams of the constellations. As you move the iPad across the sky, Star Walk automatically follows your movement. Never again will you not know what something is called in the night sky. It’s an amazing piece of software.
Good Reader
Need to read Adobe PDF files on your iPad? Look no further than Good Reader. This fast app is easy to use, allowing you to sync documents between iTunes and your iPad with ease. Files move around quickly and, more importantly, Good Reader is super-fast at displaying large PDF documents.
Good Reader is $0.99 on iTunes
IMDB/Netflix
If you’re a movie and/or television buff than IMDB is a must download. IMDB, known as the Internet Movie Database, has really delivered a beautifully designed app that puts an impressive amount of information at your fingertips, including the latest box-office results, what’s opening this weekend, movie trailers and television schedules.
If you have a Netflix subscription and want to stream movies to your iPad, then this app is a no-brainer. I have to say, the iPad version is the best yet, faster than the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 at streaming.
X-Plane
A flight-simulator on your iPad? Believe it. X-Plane is probably the most impressive game I have yet seen on the iPad. Amazingly fast and detailed graphics, excellent physics, tons of flyable planes and oodles of varied regions to fly them over. Brilliant interface, responsive controls, great pick-up-and-play sensibility. Even if you don’t like flight-sims, you’d be hard-pressed to not be blown away by X-Plane.
Marvel/Comic Zeal 4
If you’re into comics then you can’t go wrong with Marvels free reader app. It features a built-in store so you can easily snag new comics, though you’ll find far more back issues for sale than current works. Marvel is offering several recent comics for free, so you can at least check out this impressive comic reader without investing any money.
If Marvel isn’t your thing and/or you already have a library of digital comics in CBR or other popular formats, then Comic Zeal 4 is your best bet. Adding comic to your library is very easy via iTunes and once you have comics on your iPad, Comic Zeal will then compress the files further to help minimize space. Once the comics are imported, you can read them at your leisure on the iPad. Heck, Comic Zeal even puts a series of comics together in a cool little comic bin.
