jabberwock's soup

The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S are the new mainstays on the mobile market, both of them dominating in sales in both the tablet and smartphone niches, and thanks to Apple’s marketing and great developer tools, the iTunes market is filled with apps for the iOS operating system. The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S got dual core processors and a few other hardware upgrades (like a camera on the iPad 2), so here are a few apps you should try in order to get the most out of either of these two devices:

You can get all great iPad 2 and iPhone 4S apps .

• iMovie. iMovie is the official video editing application from Apple, and it’s pretty impressive seeing it in action on a tablet. The app requires a dual core processor and 512 MB of RAM, so it will only work on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, so if you have one of them, be sure to check it out. You can film something with the integrated camera or open any video file and start editing: remove frames, add special effects and filters, create a collage, and much more.

• Apple iWork Suite. The popular (among Mac OS X users) iWork Suite is Apple’s own answer to Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint combo from the Office suite, and the programs are really great, too. With Pages, Numbers and Keynote, you can open and edit any kinds of documents and spreadsheets, create presentations, documents and graphs, export to different file formats and output to an external display or projector and more. All of that from the comfort of your iPad or iPhone.

• Evernote. Evernote is the leading note taking app for the iPad and iPhone (as well as Windows and Mac OS X, as a matter of fact), and having it installed is pretty much a must if you always save interesting stuff from the Web, take photos and videos and want to organize them with notes and descriptions, or simply want to be able to save a written note every time a good idea pops in your head. You can then sync your iPad or iPhone with your online account or your computer, so you always have access to your notes and never lose them.

• Spotify. Spotify is the leading music streaming app for Android and iPhone (it started out in Europe, but has recently become available in the US and Canada, as well), and with the newest version, you can get access to over 15 million songs by most of the popular artists in the world, with new ones added every single day. Spotify Radio allows you to create stations that steam songs from the artists and albums you choose, and you get unlimited playback and skips (for the moment). If you want to save the songs to your iPad or iPhone and listen to them offline, you’ll need a Premium account, which is totally worth the cost – it’s like iTunes, only better!

• VideoSurf. If you heard of or actually like Shazam, the app that lets your phone recognize a song using a short recording of it (using the phone/tablet’s microphone), well then you’ll like VideoSurf, which brings the same functionality for videos. You can use VideoSurf to quickly find out what show or series is on TV at the moment by recording a few seconds of it and letting the app do its job. Obviously, it will work on the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2, both of which have a camera on the back, but it won’t work on the first iPad.

Obviously, these aren’t the only apps that will bring out the best in your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S, and if you want to find more of them, just do a search online or on the iTunes market – you are guaranteed to find something you like in the 500,000 apps that are published there.