The Best iPad Business Apps

Stay productive on the go with mobile office suites, remote access clients, file sync programs, and other useful business applications designed with the iPad in mind.

By Jeffrey L. Wilson

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372150,00.asp

Picture this: You’re dashing through the airport in a mad rush to catch a cross-country flight to meet clients. Now, what would you rather have in your bag, as you’re bobbing and weaving between travelers: a business laptop (which typically weighs between 3 and 6 pounds) or a 1.3-pound iPad 2? If you don’t mind working on a touch screen (or are using a Bluetooth keyboard), the choice is simple.

The App Store has an incredible software catalog that transforms Apple’s slate into a highly capable productivity device. In fact, there are apps available to meet nearly every business need, from word processing to remote access, so you can continue doing the job at hand—but on a tablet that weighs less than two pounds.

The iTunes Apps Store contains many apps that duplicate the functionality of traditional desktop applications—and the breadth of functionality continues to increase. For example, the Editors’ Choice award-winning iWork for iPad (a mobile version of Apple’s office suite), LogMeIn Ignition for iPad (a mobile version of the popular remote access software), Dragon Dictation (Nuance’s mobile application that brings much of the speech recognition functionality of Dragon NaturallySpeaking to the iPad), Filemaker Go for iPad (database software), and Power.ME (which excels at task and workflow management) give business users the ability to edit documents, access a Mac or PC remotely, transcribe voice notes, keep inventory, and keep track of important data.

The marketplace also has many apps that may not represent traditional workplace applications, but may prove useful to nonetheless. The Editors’ Choice award-winning Twitter for iPad (social networking), and Dropbox for iPad (cloud-based file synchronization) lets you build your brand and make files accessible from multiple computers.

Of course, these are just a handful of the numerous iPad business apps available in the iTunes Apps Store, but these are some of our favorites that you’ll find in our Best Business Apps roundup. Check out our slideshow to see which is best suited for the job at hand.

Click the links in the slideshow below to read more about our recommended apps for business iPad users.

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More

The 10 iPhone Apps As Important To Us As Oxygen

By Jay Yarow

Note: this phone just has the stock apps, so we'd be suffocating with it! Image: Photo illustration by Business Insider, base image from Flickr/PNASH

We have 70 different applications on our iPhone, not including the stock apps that Apple includes with the phone.Of the apps we’ve downloaded, you could take away 60 and we wouldn’t bat an eye. But if you were to take away 10 of the apps, you’d pretty much be turning our smartphone into one dumb, and sort-of pointless, phone.

Which apps do we hold near and dear? We’ve assembled them here and we’ve taken a look at how they do as a business.