About 6 weeks ago, I bought myself an Apple iPad 2 and to be very honest I love the device. What I find extremely interesting – and this I’m sure goes for everyone who has the iPad – is every time you see another iPad enabled person, the first thing you ask is, “What applications do you use?”. Let’s start looking at why and what makes the iPad a clever and useful tool for day to day business.
Portability
The iPad is super portable, it weighs next to nothing and is very thin – the battery life allows you to get a good day’s use out of it before it needs to be charged, so that means you pick it up when you leave home or the office and you don’t need to drag the charger with you.
Intuitive and simple to learn
When you pick it up, straight after you learn that the little button at the bottom of the screen face is the menu and wake up button, everything else flows as you would expect it. It really is extremely easy to use.
Applications, applications and applications
There are over 65 000 applications available for the iPad and every day that number is growing, some free and some you pay for, but in general very reasonable.
To illustrate, I wanted to get an egg timer to help from burning eggs (yes, no water in the pot and the egg white gets little burn marks where the egg has been burnt!) – there are a few egg timers available and for free. Now the iPad makes a loud clucking noise when the eggs are ready.
There are a good few as I mentioned, but before I continue, this is what I wanted to spark off with this article – let us all share what applications we have seen, used or would like to see on the iPad – that way we can discover apps that make life easier for everyone.
Battery life
As I mentioned above, you will get a full day’s use out of the iPad – I recorded a full 2 day seminar on the iPad using the application called Mobile Recorder – and after the full day session it had 25% battery life left – not bad, as at the same time I was writing notes and uploading the audio files to DropBox in the background.
Reading your news
Every morning I pick up my iPad and read the morning news off the News24 iPad app, there are a myriad of news sites, you just pick which works best for you. Or you can piece you own news together using something like Flipboard, which offers a wide variety of magazines which then come together in this “magazine type” look application. The pages actually turn just like a physical magazine would do! You add the magazines as you go.
Email
I use Google Mail to fetch all of my email and then house it as a MAPI mail server – which means the email stays on the server all the time and any of my devices can see the same view of my email and when I delete email it is removed real time off the server. For most of you out there, MS Exchange server will do a far better job and will be much easier to setup. But the point is that it’s great to get my email off a device which is big enough to read, and comfortable enough to reply to an email.
Social Media
It makes it very easy to interact with others in the social media space – I use MyPad and Twitter apps for that and they work just fine.
Books
I have a Kindle ebook reader, but I still find the iPad Kindle application rather good, as when the light is bad the backlit iPad is easier to read than the Kindle – if you read a lot the Kindle device is far better.
Browsing the Web
The Safari browser works just fine, it would be even better if the iPad had a Flash Player!
Music
I often take the iPad with me when I work in the garage, as the music quality is better than most devices of the same size. It functions just like an iPod.
Enough rambling on – I find the iPad a great device to link just about all of my information consumption and fits perfectly between my office and my phone. Yes you can do most things the iPad does, on either a phone or a PC – but it is not as easy and intuitive as the iPad – it’s best feature, …portability.
In the comment section of this article, please share with us the applications you use with the iPad and give a short description as to why it is so great – mention the price as well.
