You may wake up on Christmas morning and be handed a pair of socks, or you could be lucky and find a spanking new iPad 2 under the tree. If you’re one of the lucky ones you’ll want to start using the iPad immediately and the best way to do this is to download some cool apps.
Below is a list of some great apps (free and paid) that will cover the bases – everything from making music to photography to cooking and games.

JamPad
A great app for those with a little musical ability and it’s free. This music app is all about jamming in the moment. Great for kids too, as they can practice layering sounds and dropping beats. Groovy.

AVPlayerHD
You will find that the iPad doesn’t offer native support for many video formats. This great app supports all the main players – XVID, AVI, WMV, RMVB, H.264 and MKV – and offers compatibility with external subtitle file formats such as SMI, SRT and TXT. A must have for less that three euro.

Kindle
This one’s for bookworms. Who needs a Kindle when you can just download the Kindle app? You can download every book and magazine you have ever purchased for free and read them on the iPad. And best of all, the app is free.

Reeder for iPad
Reeder is great for people who like to get their news in real time. It’s essentially a very robust RSS reader for news junkies. Pricey enough at €3.99, but worth it.

Filterstorm
Great name for a photo and video editing app. It can import and process images in raw format and has a host of editing tools like curves manipulation, colour correction, noise reduction, sharpening and vignetting. It’s €2.99 and the Pro version is €11.99.

Facebook
Need I say more? This app was a long time coming but has been designed for the iPad from the ground up. iPad features including the cameras and location services have been thoughtfully integrated. Good work Zuck.

Real Racing 2 HD
Okay, this is expensive at €5.49, but if you like racing car games, it’s the best of the best. iPad 2 owners can enjoy full HD 1080p TV-out, to play the game on their TVs.

Jamie’s Recipes
Better than a cookbook, Jamie’s Recipes is a free app with 10 recipes, but it’s just an appetiser really. Additional recipe packs cost €1.99 each. If you bought them all, you’d have well over 100 recipes and almost 30 videos. Still good value.

The Guardian Eyewitness
What a fabulous free app. It provides a daily reflection of global events using photographs from journalists situated all over the globe. You get access to the most recent 100 photos, which can be viewed full-screen or with a caption and the ‘pro tip’ feature gives you tips on how the photo was taken. You can also save photos to your iPad or share them via email.

Twitterrific
The iPad version of Twitterrific marks a new beginning for the app, which many think has become too complicated on iPhones. On the iPad, things are more minimalist, but this makes Twitterrific a simple, good-looking and user friendly Twitter client.

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