iPad favourites - NO GAMES or WORK Apps!

I have an iPad, as does Gary and I'm sure a few others may have one too.

I thought I might offer up a couple of applications that I love to use on the iPad - not for doing "work" but for exploring the internet. I didn't use the web equivalents of these before having the iPad and I much prefer web browsing using the iPad rather than the desktop (which is a bit of a frustration for me because I do a lot of flash work!). There are website equivalents.

So a heads up to these applications:

"Cool Hunting" and "StumbleUpon" - a joy for randomly exploring the web but in a way that can match your interests.

"the Guardian eyeWitness" stunning newspaper photography allied with a photography tip.

I hope that anyone with an iPad will give these a go and I hope they find them as much fun as I do.

If anyone else has favourites, please post them but it would be nice to keep this a bit arty and related to art and photography rather than a gamefest.

I have used the internet for many years now and I can say that I find using standard computers for non work things in comparison to a tablet is starting to get a bit tedious already. Do give an iPad or one of the new Android lookalikes a try (but don't expect it to replace your standard machine). Tablets are fun.

Paul

I'll have to have a look at these Paul.

There was a thread recently in which the member was asking about vector drawing apps and I found one or two that looked quite good. Charles Moir is an iPad fanatic and claims to have 60 apps on his iPad. I'll shoot him and e-mail and see if he'll share some of his favorites with us.

In fact I have 150 apps on it now. And now thanks to the iOS4 update I can at last organise them into folders so it's all manageable. Completely agree about Guardian EyeWitness - always great photos. I subscribe to the Times and now Sunday Times apps. It took them some time, and about 6 updates to get to the point that they are now reliable and work very well. Another amazing app is called LogMeIn which allows you to control a PC remotely. I got stranded in Rome with only an iPad because of the Volcano ash cloud, and this app saved me because I could access and use my PC from my Hotel room in Rome. Even if you have two 24inch monitors connected to the PC (giving 48 inches of desktop) LogMeIn still allows you to see and control all of that. (You can see an anti-aliased scaled down view of your desktop, or a 1:1 view as a virtual window onto your PC). This one costs money, but well worth it.

In fact I've stopped using my laptop now - and use the iPad for almost everything my laptop did simply because of the shear size / weight convenience, and amazing battery life. I use it primarily as a portable email, calendar, web browser, book and magazine reader. And the fact it can now, finally, also do Google Docs (which we use in the company for all internal documentation now) means this is a serious business device from my point of view. (Couldn't be further from the 'toy' description some people gave it, or 'just an enlarged iPod'. Oh and I can type as fast if not faster on the iPad than on a real keyboard.

And it's truly great photo viewer (I've got the SD card reader dongle so I use it for viewing / downloading photos from my digital camera).

I also have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, and despite what Steve Jobs says it is a nice size (half the size of the iPad), and you can get it in a jacket pocket. But then again that size means it can't ever be a desktop or a laptop replacement, which the iPad certainly can be. The downsides with the Galaxy Tab? 1) Android - it's just crap. A poor implemented, blatant rip-off of the iPhone/iPod/iPad 2) App selection - they are beyond crap (this is what you get for a free-for-all app store). While I do not like the Apple control over the App store, you only need go see the huge number of total rubbish apps, not just badly designed, but badly written, untested, really buggy stuff to begin to think Apple have got a point with their App Store policy. 3) Battery life. I sometimes get just 3 hours from the Galaxy Tab, even carefully arranging to run just one app at a time. I get 10 hours from the iPad. 4) Flash. What I thought would be a huge advantage, works really poorly, and slows almost all pages with Flash down to the point that you'd wish they didn't put Flash on the page. Yes it's nice to have Flash when you need it, but you pay a huge performance (and I believe battery) price for it. I still want Flash in the iPad, I should have the choice, but the Android implementation of Flash is not a good advert for Flash at all.

Charles