The iPad and apps: Can the tablet top the iPhone?

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Keynote is another highly useful and effective application on the iPad. Although there’s no inbuilt projector, you can produce and display PowerPoint presentations on the iPad. This is pretty impressive as most mobile PowerPoint apps only allow you to view presentations.

Social networking

Like on the iPhone, social networking is a massive genre, and on the iPad some apps work better than others. If you only use one Twitter account for example, you may as well use Safari for Twitter access.

If you control multiple accounts though, an app such as Tweetdeck is a much more effective way of accessing all of your accounts from one place, because the screen is large enough to display columns for each account.

In terms of other social networking applications, neither LinkedIn or Facebook have have iPad versions yet, so you’ll just have to use upscaling there.

IM applications seem a bit lost and clumsy on the large screen, and they also rely on Wi-Fi.

Games

Gaming is one area where the iPad’s screen comes into its own. We’ve tested a range of games on the iPad including Real Racing HD and Plants & Zombies.

They look amazing on the massive OLED screen, which is great. But there's a downside too as they're also controlled using touch buttons or the accelerometer and it’s just not an ideal way to play games unless you’re in the safety of your own home.

Using the iPad as a steering wheel is not recommended while travelling, for example.

Another issue with games in particular is that they drain the battery life, making a fully juiced iPad shrivel to nothing after a couple of hour’s gameplay.

Better than the iPhone?

The iPad is a perfect device if you want to use it to read a newspaper, book or magazine. It’s also perfect for creating documents of its own. These benefits are down to the screen’s size and would never work on the iPhone.

However, we’d stay steer clear of using the upscaling with your existing iPhone apps - it just does not work, because iPhone apps are not designed to work on such a large screen.

Will the iPad become as big as the iPhone in the apps department? Yes - it has the potential - but it will be in an entirely different way.

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