Lots of people are wondering whether a touch-based tablet computer that doesn’t have a physical keyboard or run a traditional operating system can replace their laptops on the road. So I decided to find out.
Earlier this month, my wife and I took a 10-day working vacation to Paris, and for the first time in many years, I decided to go away for a week or more without a laptop. Instead, I resolved to rely on only an Apple iPad tablet, my smartphone and a small digital camera.
The idea wasn’t to …

What if the iPad had some apps that are built-in in the iPhone, like Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather, Voice Memos, and Compass?
We couldn’t read a great feature article on The Unofficial Apple Weblog about the Missing iPad Apps.
Just read it and get ready to download [Especially the freebies.—Ed.]

When you have done with all your usual trivialities on your iPhones and iPads, think of creating some beautiful fractal to relax and delve in a mathematic field so unknown that if you zoom enough you will be looking at fractal areas that nobody else ever looked at! [guaranteed.—Ed.]
Chromatic Chaos from Ardeasoft can help you in the endeavour, since you can zoom literally billions of times and get fractals comparable in size with Jupiter’s orbit.
Fractals can be saved in a gallery, or images can be saved in the photo album. …

An iPad plus a Bluetooth external keyboard can be a marriage made in heaven for some.
Those writing ones have definitely to look at the Keycase Folio Deluxe for the iPadcase by Aidacase.
It’ a full on folio-style case that flips open to show an external, silicone-made, full-sized keyboard.
The keyboard charges through Usb and delivers over 45 hours of battery life, more than four times iPad’s one.
The keyboard seamlessly reconnects with the iPad at the moment you want to use it.
The price? US$ 99.99 (on sale). Are you thinking of Christmas already?
[via …

Andrew and Alexa Kaz released Ruler 2.0, a small and good innovation of the ruler concept: instead of make little markings mentally match an object, Ruler is just a matter of aligning a pointer: alas, the exact measure value instantly appears.
Ruler 2.0 has an introductory price of US$ 0.99, € 0.79, and comes as a free update for buyers of version one.
But, this time, just version 2 of version 1 it is not: Andrew and Alexa point out that Ruler 1 was, by their admission, ugly and they rewrote the …

In the Any Given Sunday movie, Academy Award Best Actor Al Pacino perfectly depicts the tough, hard-paced team coach that all of us expect to be behind a great team success!
No matter how big is your team, no matter how tough are your opponent’s game: it’s time to draw the perfect tactics – right on your iPad – with CoachPad!
CoachPad allows you to sketch out and display formations and tactics all using your iPad in a simple and intuitive way.
Sketches are automatically saved and can be viewed or removed in …

Want to Get Things Done once and forever? Have a look at Delegate 1.1 by app4Mac, for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
The new version generally improves application and apps, fixes bugs, treates foreign languages better, and the like.
Until the end of September, mobile versions of Delegate are only US$ 2.99, € 2.39.
Those who opt for the Mac version can share a to-do list on the Internet with a free online service powered by app4mac servers.
Whatever version you choose, remember to stay focused on one task at a time and leave multitasking …

The difference between iPad and netbooks is that you can found iPad Orchestra with the former, and perform Sweet Dream by Ilya Plavunov on four iPads.
iPad Orchestra uses Seline HD, an app by Amidio, which features a new, ergonomically designed playing surface called ioGrid.
With Seline HD, the player can choose among twenty built-in factory voices – flutes, bowed strings, reeds, synth leads and more – and nine drone voices.
Drones do not fly in Seline HD: they are chorded synth pads that are generated on-the-fly via software based on the complex …

Try to guess why a company should call itself Punflay… exactly, well done!
Educational iPad apps and games from Punflay are on sale until Thursday, September 16th.
MyNumbers is US$ 0.99 instead of 1.99: the app has the look and feel of a simple toy that helps kids learn to count from 1 to 10 [yesterday night had beer party and badly needed app for myself—Ed.].
Same discount as above for Mathomatix Number Sense/HD: five activities to teach simple counting, addition, and subtraction to kindergartners. The app has been redesigned using feedback from …

Corey Angst, assistant professor of management at the American University of Notre Dame, is debuting the first and only class taught using iPad in substitution of traditional textbooks.
Forty students are following the course, using iPads borrowed from the University.

The broader goal of the initiative is to build an ePublishing ecosystem that eases and makes inexpensive creation, management, sharing, annotation, reading, and distribution of education materials between teachers, students, and staff.
This is huge and shows how the iPad is poised to radically change the world in which we will live, starting …

With all this technology at hand, it is easy to forget our humanist side and the whole concept of liberal arts, so called because a master at them could be free and stay free in ancient Rome.
Although far in time, the concept still holds true today: if you want real freedom, cultivate as much literature and arts as you can.
And if you have an iPad at hand, get Poet’s Pad by Dante Vanado Moore. [a nom-de-plume?—Ed.]
Poet’s Pad allows poets to write, arrange, and store poems in one app, and even …

Apple’s iPads have taken over the set of CNBC’s Fast Money program.
No wonder: an iPad is sleek, hassle-free, aesthetically pleasing, and can be a perfect terminal for receiving financial information on-the-fly, via either Wi-Fi or 3G connection.
It seems also that CNBC managed to get the proper orientation for all the Apple logos in sight. Bonus points for this, folks.
So, there’s one more reason to watch Fast Money. [I’ll wait until they sponsor us.—Ed]
[via MacDailyNews]

Don’t worry when you read pundits declaring that iPad is a consumption device, inadequate for productivity.
Think of SAP instead, that distributed one thousand iPads to their workforce, and supposedly not to play Fieldrunners.
Each iPad is equipped with access to Citrix tools via a virtual private network (VPN) and with the Mobile Sales for SAP CRM app for iOS.
Oliver Bussmann, SAP’s CIO, said via Twitter that there’s more to come.
Laughs at pundits’ vacuous rants, maybe.

Back to school and the same need to take notes during lessons, jot down sketches, write annotations and setting calendars, maybe sharing all this wealth of information with mates and teachers.
We suggest CourseNotes 2.0 by Dear Panda. You can do all of that and more, included viewing shared notes of your Facebook friends from within the app.
Inside the app there’s also a new Premium Content store, where to buy study-sheets about various matters, from French verb conjugations [nothing about French kisses?—Ed.] to the Periodic Table of the Elements.
The price to …

Just a bunch of programmers in the world hadn’t written a Twitter app for the iPad yet. Twitter’s programmers.
Finally they did it too and their effort could be viewed by someone as one of the best Twitter apps for the iPad as of now.
It’s not the usual beefed-up iPhone app, but a real boon for a bigger screen. Every tweet shows in a panel what it linked, it’s possible to search for global trends and much, much more.
At this price — that is, for free — it’s almost a crime …

According to NetMarketshare, iOS browsing global quota surpassed Linux’s starting from July 2010 and our beloved iPad shares some merit from that with iPhone and iPod touch.
Linux-powered devices exist from more than a dozen of years. They are usually capable desktop or laptop computer, with big screens, fast processors, true keyboards, multi-button mice, strong Internet connections.
Nevertheless, in three years a entirely new category of devices, with small screens, relatively slow processors and no physical keyboard at all surpassed them in terms of generated web traffic.
As a bonus, you can check …

iPad is going to radically change the way we interact with computers, especially at home.
You can tell by looking at products like PadTab, a wall mount kit that allows the iPad to be firmly put on a wall or house appliance.
The kit comes with two wall tabs, that adhere to walls or refrigerators thanks to industrial-strength adhesive, and an iPad tab that stays in the same way on the iPad. You can order more wall tabs if you like.
We wouldn’t apply to out iPad a plastic structure that is more …

As far as we know, App Store lacked an iPad Photo app able to use metadata information from photographs for searches and various other chores.
Sort Shots – iPad Edition 2.0 from Today Beanheads Consulting Inc. closes the hole.
The app allows users to import images via iTunes while retaining previously assigned metadata keywords and ratings, so users can simply tap on desired search criteria to find photos instantly.
Tags and ratings asseigned to images in Sort Shots can be exported and used by some desktop applications like Photoshop Bridge and Lightroom from …

Just a remainder for all those people that asked themselves how to play Internet radio in background with the iPad, and gave the wrong answer.
This is often possibile indeed, even if iOS 4 — and its multitasking feature — isn’t yet compatible with the iPad.
The trick is to find an Internet radio you can listen inside Safari, activating it… and then going to the next app. Safari will close, but the stream will continue to play.
Just be sure to choose either a radio Safari can play… and that you like, …

Great news from a more-than-traditional journalism trench—the venerable New Yorker.
The New Yorker Digital Edition was previously incompatible with Safari running on the iPad, and it was a shame, since the Digital Edition allows access to 85 years of old New Yorker issues, other than showing recent and current issues, of course.
Now things have changed for the better: the Digital Edition automatically recognizes requests coming from an iPad and serves an optimized version of the site.
Portrait iPads show single pages, and landscape ones show spreads; you can double-tap to zoom and …