iPad: What I really need

2011-02-24

Sometimes I want to jot down thought on things to work them out. Some of these things make for excellent blog posts since others are in similar situations. I bet this is of of those, so here goes.

I’m a big iPad fan and avid user, having had it since weeks after the wifi model launched in the US. Currently, I have an iPad 3G with 32 GB storage. It’s almost always packed, but the culprit isn’t movies, music (that’s just some 6 GB of essentials) or even photos. No, the problem is apps.

I have lots of apps, and I keep them way too long.

This got me thinking. What kinds of apps do I really need for my iPad?

• Writing. I’m a writer so obviously I need writing apps. Or app mayhap, why spread my work across several apps really? There is a reason for that, which we’ll explore in a later post.
• The social web. Twitter, Beejive for IM, stuff like that.
• Web browser and mail. Obviously.
• Games. Sometimes you need to kill some time. Can’t be too many though, got 50+ at the moment, most of which I haven’t even started yet. That’s not good at all.
• Reading. This is important. We’ve got stuff like Kindle, Instapaper and Reeder here.
• Media apps. For music and video playback.
• Utilities. A calculator, Dropbox, stuff like that.

That’s it then. Did I forget something crucial?

Next I’ll try and cut down my apps to fit this list. It’ll be interesting to see how many I end up with.

• ipad
• productivity