15 Best iPad Apps for Newbies

Magazines play well on the iPad because of the casual reading experience. Flipboard (free) is an app for creating a customized magazine that pulls content and pictures from Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Flickr, favorite blogs and Web sites. Best of all, Flipboard lets you flip through the neatly organized, wonderfully laid-out pages.

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.

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.