2011: Top 13 Apps for New Apple iPad Owners (www.drmobiles.co.nz) iPhone 4 Unlock

So you’ve found yourself blown away by Apple’s new iPad 2, and March 11 doesn’t seem like it can come soon enough. If you decided to hold out until now, watching all your friends and family enjoy their now-vintage iPads, good for you. The new iteration of the Apple tablet is thinner than the iPhone 4, it has a powerful dual-core processor and manages to retain its incredible 10-hour battery life. However, it’s the apps that really make the iPad shine, and if you’re new to the device, here are 25 of our favorites that we think every newbie should download.

1. Friendly for Facebook

Who isn’t on Facebook these days? While the Facebook app for iPhone is probably the best on any mobile device, the social network has largely ignored the iPad. Friendly for Facebook is free – if you want the ad-free version, it’s only $0.99 – and the interface is rich and easy to use. You can view status updates, send and receive messages and do just about everything you can with the web client. The only thing that can make Friendly for Facebook a little better is push notifications, but as it stands it’s probably the best Facebook app for the iPad right now.

Friendly for Facebook – iTunes Link [Free or $0.99 for ad-free version]

2. Epicurious

Whether you’re a seasoned chef or a little green when it comes to navigating the kitchen, Epicurious really has a little bit of everything for everyone. You can search thousands of recipes and cocktails, and it can even help you when you’re doing your grocery shopping. It’s a very feature rich app, full of images and info on food and meals, and you can cook with your iPad nearby – hopefully not too close to liquids or flames or knives! – and follow directions as you go along. For those of you who are a bit health conscious, the app also has nutritional information for thousands of items, too.

Epicurious – iTunes link [Free]

3. Flipboard

Do you check multiple social networking sites and news sites on a daily basis? Wish there was some other way to get them all into one place in an attractive and easy to navigate layout? Flipboard is what you’re looking for. It aggregates content from the sites you visit most – you get to choose what to include in your stream of content – and gives it a newspaper/magazine look. It’s a very beautiful interface and makes consuming and digesting all that news and your friends’ updates much easier.

When you open the app, you can flip through two pages full of tiles that are linked with each website or social networking service you designated. Once you click on the tile, you’re taken into a newspaper or magazine style layout that makes browsing it all more palatable. Best of all, it’s completely free.

Flipboard – iTunes link [Free]

4. Instapaper

Instapaper helps you save web articles that you want to read later, whether you’re online or off. That’s really the beauty of Instapaper: because you can save dozens of articles for offline reading, it has made traveling and commuting a pleasure. You can also adjust font sizes for easier reading, and the way the app lays out text sometimes makes it easier to read compared to how it appears on the web. Instapaper also allows you to share articles you’ve found interesting, and if you’re running out of reading content yourself, you can browse articles and Editors’ Picks, which are based on some of the most-saved stories in the Instapaper community.

Instapaper – iTunes link [$4.99 and definitely worth every penny]

5. Netflix

More than half of my time spent on the iPad is dedicated to watching videos, and I watch almost all of them on Netflix. If you don’t already have a Netflix account, it’s only $7.99 a month for unlimited streaming. And if you’re already a Netflix subscriber, grabbing this app is really a no-brainer. The iPad app has an easy-to-navigate interface and offers everything you’d be able to stream when you’re on your computer. Video quality is impressive and the controls are very similar to what you’d see with the YouTube app or Quicktime.

Netflix – iTunes link [Free]

6. Kindle/Nook/iBooks

If you don’t own a Kindle or a Nook, iBooks is definitely an excellent option as an e-Reader. However, if you do have a Kindle or Nook, the iPad has both apps available for free. You can have your library of books within the app, so if you’re traveling around with your iPad and you didn’t want to carry your dedicated e-Reader along with you, you can still read your books from the Apple tablet. The apps all give you the option to adjust text size, brightness, color and font – the whole shebang. Bibliophiles who are permanently glued to their e-Readers might want to give one of these apps a try. The only downside, even with additional brightness settings in the apps, is that it reading on the iPad can be on the bright side when you’re in bed at night.

iBooks link, Nook link, Kindle link [All free]

7. Angry Birds HD

How can we forget the game that has taken the mobile world by storm? Angry Birds HD is optimized for the iPad screen, so you can enjoy the game as you would on your iPhone, but with crisp graphics instead of the scaled-up version of the mobile app. If you aren’t familiar with the game, you’re basically a clan of birds attempting to recover eggs from evil pigs. You launch birds from a slingshot against the pig fortresses, and breaking the piggy defenses become more difficult as you progress through the game. Of course, there are a variety of birds with special abilities to help with that task, too. If you decide to download this game, be prepared to waste, and lose track of, lots of time. But it’s worth it!

Angry Birds – iTunes link [$4.99]

8. Twitter for iPad

Everyone’s doing it. Celebrities and regular schmoes alike are on Twitter sharing interesting events, articles, videos and the minutiae of their daily lives on the fast-growing social network. The dedicated Twitter app for the iPad allows you to post your thoughts and musings, you can attach links and your location, view friends’ updates and a whole lot more. It’s definitely a feature-rich app and makes digesting and sharing anything and everything that should or shouldn’t be on Twitter a breeze. Like the iPhone app, Twitter for iPad is totally free. If you want to see what the buzz is all about, sign up for an account within the app on your new iPad!

Twitter for iPad – iTunes link [Free]

9. Skyfire for iPad

It’s not a big secret that the iPad and iPhone don’t play well with Flash video content, but that’s what Skyfire is for. The app lets you view the web as it should be viewed – with Flash videos and ads and banners and everything else in between. Skyfire converts Flash content into iPad-friendly content so that you don’t land on mostly empty pages wondering where half of the good stuff went. The only thing Skyfire won’t convert are Flash-based games, but most of those require a mouse and keyboard, anyway. The app is so outrageously popular, in fact, that it sold out immediately and overloaded Skyfire’s servers when it was first released.

Skyfire – iTunes link [$4.99]

10. NY Times

For those of you that subscribe to the New York Times, or perhaps you read it online every day, the iPad app is actually quite nice. It looks much like it does on the web, but everything is condensed and sized to fit the iPad screen perfectly. You can swipe through sections as headlines slide over to reveal new ones, and the sections menu is tucked away neatly in a corner so the text and news isn’t obstructed. The content is the same as what you’d find on the web, so it certainly isn’t a watered-down version of the NY Times by any means. Best of all, the app is totally free. If you read the NY Times daily, this should definitely be one of your first downloads.

NY Times – iTunes link [Free]

11. Pandora

Pandora subscribers will love the app for the iPad, and thanks to its multi-tasking capabilities, you can have Pandora running in the background while you do other things on your iPad. If you don’t have a Pandora account, consider signing up: it’s free for basic use, and it’s only a small premium if you want more features like unlimited skipping of content. For regular Pandora users, especially subscribers, the app is definitely a must. You can create custom stations simply by entering the name of an artist, song or style of music, and Pandora will tailor one for you. Pretty nifty, and the app itself is free.

Pandora – iTunes link [Free]

12. Evernote

Evernote is a fantastic note-taking tool that allows you to take notes, pictures, voice notes, access files and sync them all to your computer. The service is free for a limited amount of storage, but you can pay to expand if needed. It’s definitely a handy tool when you need to access files and info between your iPad and your PC. The next time you have an idea or you see something you want to research later, you can write it down or take a snapshot and upload it right to Evernote, then you can access that information later on your iPad, iPhone or your computer. The app is also free, so there’s no reason not to get it.

Evernote – iTunes link [Free]

13. Pulse

Pulse is an amazing news aggregator that, like Flipboard, allows you to customize your content. However, Pulse delivers it in a more visual way with less text than Flipboard. I happen to like both apps a lot, but Pulse might appease those who want to see headlines only coupled with an image. All the sites you want to browse through, from arts & entertainment to science & technology, are lined up in rows of images with the headlines superimposed on the image, and the UI is very clean and easy to use. There is even a brief tutorial section on how to use Pulse, but it is mostly intuitive. If you have several sites you like to keep up with on a daily basis, Pulse is an excellent visual tool that helps you do that. Oh, and it’s free.

Pulse for iPad [Free]

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