iPad!!! (Tell me what I should do with it!)

[Eravial]

I just got an iPad from my company for work! I can do pretty much anything with it that I want for the time that I have it, though, and am already totally geeking out over some free apps I'm trying out. So far, I've got a couple PDF books in iBooks, the free versions of the New York Times and The Economist, Words With Friends (play me!! send me a PM!), and an alarm clock.

iPad (and iPhone) users, what other apps do you recommend? I'd prefer to stay with free/cheap apps at the moment, but if there's something that's really awesome, I might consider spending more. I'd be particularly interested in anything related to productivity, science, classic games, music, news, fitness/health, and apps that you never realized you absolutely needed until you got them. Also, any tips for utilizing features the iPad already comes with?

[octarineoboe]

I have pitch pipe, piano keyboard, metronome and tuner apps on my iPod touch. None of them work as well as the real versions of any of those things, and you can't run the metronome and tuner simultaneously. Still, they're definitely useful. The piano app was super-helpful when I had to prepare for running a cappella rehearsals without having a good time to sit down in a practice room. I also have a simple recording app that was really handy for voice lessons and providing feedback on my own performance. Most of those were free, one of them was somewhere in the $1-2 range. I can look up the details of what i have if you're interested.

The native maps application has also saved my butt more than once on both iPad and iPod.

[Mathmo]

Totally totally frivolous and not productive at all but I really enjoy playing DragonVale on MrM's iPad. The idea is you run a kind of dragon breeding place / zoo, and wizards and princesses and things come and wander round and look at the dragons. The main aim is to breed lots of interesting dragons, and level them up (you can spend money to grow food to feed to the dragons to raise their level, but they don't need food to live). It's good because if you just forget about them for a week or two they don't die or anything, you just don't make as much money (you have to empty the habitats of money regularly or they get full and just stay full). I believe it's a free game but there are things you can pay for if you want to do stuff more quickly; you can definitely play it without needing to spend money