By Leo Stiles
Although the iPad has been in the wild for a few months now, the debate still rages on about whether the tablet is just an oversized iPod or something more. One thing that both camps can agree on is that the price of the apps for the device is approaching the ridiculous with some apps for the iPad costing three times as much as their iPod equivalent.
Thankfully, many of the best apps for the iPad are still free, so we thought we would bring you five of the best.
Air Video
One of the biggest criticisms of the iPad is that its storage space is relatively small, with the largest capacity model coming in at just 64GB. That means limited space for just about everything including movies (which have to be formatted correctly and then synched to the tablet via iTunes).
Air Video solves this problem by giving you access to all the movies and TV shows that you have stored on your PC or hard drive and then streaming them to your iPad over your home network.
While there are a number of apps in the app store that do this, Air Video has them all beaten with the inclusion of live conversion which reformats any file to play on the iPad, streaming the file without any delay or loss of quality.
Comics
The iPad app store is awash with comic apps with excellent offerings from all the major labels, including Marvel, DC and IDW. All these apps offer an intuitive experience with pages and panels zooming in and out as you touch and pinch, and with built-in stores giving users access to tens of thousands of titles for around €2 each.
Reading a comic on the iPad is a brilliant experience with the HD screen displaying pages with rich detail and vivid colours that make releasing you inner geek as cool as it’s ever going to be.
These apps are fine if you want to just read the titles available in each of the apps stores but what if you have comics kicking around your hard drive? Well, there is an app for that in Comic Book Lover, which lets you download all your digital comics to your iPad using some nifty software that uploads your comics to the net first before making them available to your iPad.
Adobe Ideas
A simple app that again takes advantage of the large iPad screen to allow the more creative of you to sketch out ideas, templates and  the odd doodle using just your fingers. Designed around Adobe’s market leading creative suite of software, Ideas lets you draw freestyle and give you options such as brush size, erase, resize the image or change the image orientation.
The coolest feature is the app’s ability to draw onto photographs. Impressively, you are presented with a colour palate that corresponds with the colours of the image you are painting on. For those of you with the time, patience and talent, Adobe Ideas is a surprisingly versatile tool capable of producing fairly decent quality art.
For everyone else, it gives you the perfect tool to paint comedy genitalia all over photos of your mates… if you are so inclined.
iBooks
We already took iBooks for a spin on the iPhone and found it to be the e-reader of choice for our mobile. But as good as iBooks on the iPhone is, iBooks is truly at home on the iPad, the machine on which it was designed to run.
Pages are displayed full screen and the HD resolution of the iPad reduces any eye strain with text remaining pin sharp, even when displayed in the smallest size. Turning a page is a simple at swiping a finger across the screen with a nice animation of the turning page mimicking your moves. Any pictures are displayed as they would be on a real page but you can also zoom in on them with a quick double tap.
So far, no deal has been struck by Apple with publishers to offer new release titles in Apple’s online Irish bookstore, but there is a sizable section of classics to choose from that should provide ample distraction until you are able to buy and upload the latest John Connelly or Nick Hornby novels.
IM+ Lite
iPhone users are having a ball with multitasking, jumping from app to app with the tap of a finger. iPad users are still stuck with running one app at a time, making social networking on the tablet a chore since each app has to close down completely before you can boot up another.
IM+ solves this problem in the short term, giving you access to Google Chat, MSN, AIM, ICQ, My Space, Facebook and Twitter. The app presents all your messages in one continuous timeline for easier reading and allows you to send and receive emails, photos and videos.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Conor Sketches | Tiger Woods loves Ger Loughnane and cosplaying as Charles LeClerc
