Most people don’t get a computer to balance their budget or write business reports. Instead, most people really get a computer to play games and have fun. While you can use your iPad exclusively for business, you can easily turn your iPad into an entertainment center to watch videos, listen to Internet radio stations, or read the latest classics or best sellers.
iBooks, Apple’s free reading app, gives you access to the iBookstore and lets you organize and read your ebooks. If you have a Kindle, download a free copy of the Kindle app so you can read all your Kindle ebooks on either your Kindle or your iPad.
For another alternative to Apple’s iBookstore, download a free copy of the Barnes & Noble NOOK app. Just like the iBooks and Kindle apps, the NOOK app organizes your ebooks and lets you shop online for more books. With so many options for reading ebooks on your iPad, you can choose what you like best.
If you subscribe to Netflix, download this free app, and you can watch streaming video directly on your iPad. Now you can watch movies or TV shows at your convenience without waiting for the mail to arrive.
Watching movies through Netflix can be nice, but if you want to watch your favorite ABC TV shows, then get the ABC Player app for free. With this app you can see what’s playing or stream episodes of your favorite shows and watch them on your iPad, as shown in Figure 29-9.
One way to keep yourself amused with your iPad is to sing along while listening to the songs you’ve stored on your iPad. Another way to amuse yourself with music is to create your own songs. Although it’s not always practical to carry around an electronic keyboard, it is possible to turn your iPad into a musical instrument with JamPad or Virtuoso, as shown in Figure 29-10.
Virtuoso can help you learn the notes on a keyboard while JamPad lets you play keyboards, guitar, or drums to develop your music skills, or just play sounds to keep yourself or your kids amused on a long car ride or plane trip. If the racket gets too annoying for others to hear, bring headphones or ear buds to restrict the noise you make to your own eardrums.
While you’re at home, you may prefer to play your music collection from your PC or Mac computer. The free Remote app lets you use your iPad to control iTunes on your computer from any room in the house—your iPad and computer just need to be on the same Wi-Fi network.
No matter how large your music collection may get, chances are good you’ll want to listen to something different. To help you find songs from different artists that you might enjoy, download the Pandora app.
Pandora lets you type in the name of your favorite recording artist or song, and then it plays only those songs that are similar to your chosen artist or song. By doing this, Pandora can help you discover new recording artists and songs that you might never have heard before.
For aspiring movie makers and musicians, two of the best apps are iMovie and GarageBand. With iMovie, you can edit any video footage you capture through the iPad’s cameras. This lets you capture a video from your iPad’s camera, and then edit it to create a more polished video clip that you can share with others or upload to a video sharing site like YouTube.
GarageBand lets you turn your iPad into different musical instruments, such as drums or a keyboard, and then record your music, turning your iPad into a portable recording studio. Whether you’re just learning to play an instrument or have years of experience, GarageBand can turn your iPad into an indispensable tool to further your musical aspirations.
The Flipboard app takes your favorite news sites, blogs, or social networking sites and turns them into an attractive digital “newspaper,” as shown in Figure 29-11.
The iPad has hundreds of small, cheap, and fun games perfectly suited for wasting your time. The App Store lists today’s best sellers, and most games have free trials. If you’re looking to try your very first iPad game, you should try Angry Birds, a simple and addictive physics game with more than 100 million total downloads.
You can compare high scores with your friends and family by creating an account in the iPad’s Game Center app.
Annoyed by the Game Center notification (shown in Figure 29-12) while playing games? You can turn off Game Center notifications (and any other notifications that might bother you) in the Notifications pane of the Settings screen.
