15 Best iPad Apps for Newbies

Comics are fast-becoming an exciting form of literature, but they don’t render well on black-and-white tablets. Thankfully, the iPad is bursting with color and can showcase comics in all their glory. Now you can catch all your favorite superheroes in action on your iPad with Marvel Comics (free).

The iPad isn’t all fun and games, sometimes there’s real work to be done. That’s when you’ll need two apps: cloud storage app Dropbox (free up to 2GB) and Quickoffice. Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad ($14.99) lets you access and work on Dropbox-stored Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and, recently, PowerPoint slides.

The 10-inch iPad screen is roughly the size of a bento box, a neatly packed Japanese meal. This makes Bento for iPad ($4.99) a perfect fit. Optimized for the iPad, Bento is a personal organizer that helps you manage everything from contacts, events and to-do items to special activities such as exercise regimens and diet plans.

Sure, there’s a time and place for watching HD movies on a big screen. More often than not, though, you’ll catch a flick while on the go or quietly in bed. At times like these, you’ll want Netflix (free) on the iPad. The iPad’s screen is big enough to catch R2-D2’s cameo in J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek blockbuster movie.

The Daily ($39.99 per year) recently debuted on the iPad under Apple’s new subscription model. For a dime and a penny a day, you get more than 100 pages of original news, entertainment, lifestyle, opinions, breaking news updates, customized sports pages, videos, interactive graphics, and great photography.

Most of us got through college by scratching notes on a pad of paper. Penultimate ($1.99) brings that chaotic yet critical learning experience to the iPad. Using inking technology, Penultimate lets you take notes on realistic paper. After all, it’s how some of the world’s greatest ideas got started.

Apple’s productivity apps were made for the iPad (or maybe it’s the other way around?). They consist of Pages ($9.99) for word processing, Keynote ($9.99) for presentations and Numbers ($9.99) for spreadsheets. I think they beat the pants off of Microsoft Office. The only problem is that everyone else uses Office.