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.