Best iPad Apps

iPad

Hundreds of thousands of apps were released in 2011. Many were games, but a large number of apps were geared towards personal productivity, education, business, and more. That’s where TabTimes come in.


Even before we blinked into existence in October, our writers and editors had been scanning the App Store and Android Marketplace for top-sellers in five key categories: Productivity, Education, Healthcare, Business, News, and Utilities. With thousands of apps available, that’s a lot of scanning and a lot of testing.

We’ve also been lucky enough to get recommendations from IT administrators, construction managers, lawyers, doctors, software developers, and more. These days, just about everyone has some strong opinions as well as some unique revelations about the most effective apps for specific tasks.

Beginning today, we’re going to round-up the very best of the best apps across multiple categories for the iPad. We’re going to do this every year from here on out.

Because there are less tablet-specific apps available for the Android Honeycomb platform, for 2011, we’re going to combine all five categories into one big 25-app “best-of” list for this year. Our expectation is that by next year, we’ll be able to break this out further.

Our publishing schedule for the best apps of the year will be:
Sunday, December 25: 20 best iPad productivity apps
Monday, December 26: 15 best iPad education and reference apps
Tuesday, December 27: 10 best iPad healthcare apps
Wednesday, December 28: 20 best iPad business apps
Thursday, December 29: 15 best iPad news apps
Friday, December 30: 20 best iPad utility apps

Some criteria we kept in mind as we searched for the Top 100 iPad apps for work were:
Barring some good reason, the app must have a 4-star average user rating or higher. An app with a lower-rating, must have a high concentration of 4-star and higher ratings since its latest update.
The app must have been released or seen a significant update in the past year.
The app must be specific to the iPad, or be an iPad optimized app. No iPhone versions allowed.
The app must be stable and work in an above average or extraordinary fashion.

We hope you find our list helpful and productive. As always, we’re open to your suggestions, thoughts and ideas, which you can direct at us via the comments section on this page or in the best-of lists themselves.