I admit it: I was wrong. When the iPad first came out, I was extremely dismissive of it, describing it as twice the price of a netbook for half the functionality - and the additional portability it offered would be lost by the time you'd added a case with a bluetooth keyboard. Plus you couldn't even use one without first hooking it up to the awful iTunes.

Ok, you'll have to excuse me here: I can't go any further without a brief rant about iTunes. It is very possibly the worst software in the history of the universe. And I speak as someone who used to work for a corporation who insisted we use an Oracle database for expenses and timesheets. For example, to copy a film from your PC to the iPad, you have to first go to the File menu, select Add File and then double-click the film in the Movies directory on your PC. Then hit Sync and you're done, right? No. No no no no no. First, you must hit Apply, just to convince iTunes that you really meant it. Then wait. Then you must click the name of your iPad (despite the fact that only one at a time can be connected to iTunes). Then you must click the Films button. No! Not that one! Not the one in the vertical menu on the left, where you've been clicking so far, but the one on the horizontal menu on the top-right that doesn't even appear until you have clicked on the name of your iPad (the only device that you could possibly be wanting to do anything with at that time but have to click on anyway, yes, that one). Then you get a list of fims in the directory. Except, you don't. First you have to tick the Sync Films checkbox. Because obviously I'd be adding films to my library if I didn't want to sync them ... But then you get a list of your films. And despite the fact that you added it to your library, and despite the fact that you clicked Sync Films, iTunes assumes you only did this for amusement value and don't want to sync it to your iPad because the film you just added will at this point be unticked. So you tick it. Then you can sync your iPad, and the film will be copied to it. And all the rest of the films on it will be removed because you foolishly thought you didn't need to re-transfer the ones already on it, so could safely untick those. So you retick all the others, wait for it to process all of your films, and then, finally, you have your film on your iPad. If you didn't miss any of the steps. How on earth can a company that makes such beautiful hardware, and which prides itself on simple user-interfaces, produce this utter abomination?!

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, how I came to change my mind about the iPad. I bought one more-or-less accidentally. I loved my Kindle, and thought that it would be cool to have a sort of film version of the Kindle: a convenient device to allow me to watch films on trains or in bed. I looked at various tablets, and had to admit that none of them came close to the iPad for screen quality and performance. I thus bought a secondhand wifi-only first-generation iPad purely for that purpose.

I was astonished. While I wasn't exactly wrong about 'half the functionality of a netbook', it was a far more capable device than I'd given it credit for. It was, for example, capable of being a pretty decent wordprocessor. And as a lifelong hater of touchscreen keyboards, I was amazed to find that the iPad one was so good, there was in fact no need for a bluetooth one.

So suddenly this device I'd expected to have one main function, plus a bit of web-browsing, started looking like a much more usable machine. I actually ended up writing thousands of words of novel on it, preferring it over a netbook for two reasons.

First, the battery-life. Manufacturers always quote times based on highly unrealistic usage: being switched on once, then used continuously for undemanding tasks at a barely-visible screen brightness. My rule-of-thumb for real-world battery-life has always been to halve the manufacturers' claim. But not in this case. Apple claims 10 hours, and you really do get that - at a sensible brightness level. In fact, I used mine one day for 9.5 hours and it was still showing 27% battery-life remaining. Charging is also extremely fast, so I don't think there's any occasion it couldn't make it through an entire day of heavy use.

The second decisive advantage over a netbook is the instant-on. Netbooks are slow devices. Resuming Windows from hibernation takes 40 seconds to a minute. Hibernating takes 20-30 seconds. Most don't have a SIM slot, so connecting to a phone for a net connection takes another 10-20 seconds. These times don't sound long, but they mean that if you find yourself with a few minutes of spare time while out & about, it's really not worth the effort of using it. The iPad, in contrast, is on as soon as you lift the smartcover, and off again the moment you close it. I would write a paragraph or two of novel on a quick tube hop of 2-3 stops. If I wanted to check a train time, a task painful on a phone screen, I'd do it in 10 seconds on my iPad.

I sold my wifi one almost immediately to buy a wifi+3G model. I also sold my netbook at the same time. The only thing lacking from it was a camera for skype video calls. Since my girlfriend and I currently live 200 miles away from each other, this is a rather core application for me. By this time, I was so enamoured with the device that not even the eye-watering price of a top-of-the-range iPad 2 could put me off. Oh yes, that was something else I was wrong about, by the way: my iPad eventually ended up costing me not twice as much as a netbook, but three times as much.

But it is absolutely worth it. It's portable enough that I carry it pretty much everywhere. And half the time at home, if I just want to quickly check my email or look something up on the web, I'll use the iPad rather than my laptop. It may even have pipped my Kindle at the post to become my favourite gadget.

I believe it's mandatory for all iPad owners to create a webpage with their top-ten recommended apps, so here are mine ...

I'm taking it as read, by the way, that any self-respecting geek will install Skype, Beejive and Spotify as a matter of course. I'm also taking it for granted that you'll use an ebook reader. Having compared Apple's supplied iBooks app with the iPad Kindle app, I actually prefer the former:

As a hardware device, though, the iPad is no match for the Kindle. The Kindle is lighter, more comfortable to hold, the screen is much more restful to read and a touchscreen is a positive drawback when reading a book. With the Kindle, it doesn't matter how I hold it, I'm not going to accidentally change page. But there are times when I don't want to carry both devices, so I have all of my books on both.

Pages

There are two main wordprocessor apps for the iPad, Office HD and Pages. Since I use Office on my laptop, I assumed this would be the one for me, but I actually found I greatly preferred Apple's Pages app. It has enough features for most typical writers, but doesn't get in the way of the writing. You get to use most of the screen for your text (thanks largely to a toolbar that you can snap away when not using it), and it's very intuitive.

Of course, to get the document onto your PC, you'd usually have to use the abysmal iTunes. Or lose the will to live and simply email it to yourself. But if you have a Dropbox account (and if not, why not?), you can download an app called WebDAV. Once you've done this, and given it your Dropbox account login, you get an extra option on your document save menu: Save to WebDAV. Select that (and select Doc as the format) and it will be copied to your Dropbox folder as a Word document. And thence to the synced folder on your PC. You can of course do this anywhere you happen to be if you have a 3G iPad or a wifi connection.

AVPlayerHD

The built-in video player on the iPad is very limited in the file formats it will play. AVPlayerHD seems to play just about anything. It also has wifi transfer to bypass the dire iTunes: just open a web-browser on your PC and transfer video files directly to the iPad. The only pain is that you can only do these one at a time - you can't queue files.

myTrains

A fantastically useful app for anyone who does a lot of train travel. It has the usual journey-planning tools you'd expect from this kind of app, but starts with a Favourites page which can be any mix of regular journeys and departure/arrivals boards for your usual train stations. Very often the app gets updated before the physical board at the station, so you can beat the crowds to the right platform. You can also track the progress of a train, seeing (roughly) where it is and the estimated times at each station.

London Journey Planner

There are quite a few of these around. Essentially they are just pretty front-ends to the journey data and planning tools available on the TfL website, but it's much quicker to use than the website. This one is particularly comprehensive, offering maps, journey planners, status updates and live departure boards.

Cycle Deluxe

No self-respecting Boris Biker would be without one of these apps, and this is my fave. It shows the locations of all Boris Biker terminals with a colour-coded status pin. You can click on the pin to see how many bikes and free dock slots are available, plan a journey and tell it to direct you to the nearest suitable dock for either hiring or returning a bike.

Photo Transfer

Another testament to the depth of my dislike for the evil iTunes. While I do use iTunes to transfer photo portfolios, if I just want to copy some photos from my PC temporarily, I use this app. You run the app, it gives you an URL to connect to on your PC (PC and iPad must be connected to the same wifi network) and you can then copy photos across. Simple and effective.

Atomic Web Browser

Yes, it is a bloody silly name. But a very nice browser with proper tabs, not the separate 'pages' Safari uses for some reason best known only to Apple (probably borrowed developers from the iTunes team). It's also faster and can emulate other browsers, very useful if you want to avoid being automatically redirected to the mobile version of a website. I only wish I could set it as the default browser so that Apple's email client would open links in this instead of Safari.

2Do

A fantastic task manager app. I could and have spent days playing with different personal productivity tools. Days that might be better spent actually being productive, but that's another debate. For the iPad, I managed to limit myself to playing with four or five of them before finding one that worked exactly the way I wanted it to.

You can have multiple to-do lists, which are colour-coded. For example, I have three work lists (Research, Photography and Writing) and two personal ones (Admin and Fun). I can click on any of these tabs to see the whole of that list and edit items on it. But I also assign a Star to my most important tasks from each list and can click on the Starred tab to see all of those priority tasks. I can see from the colour-coded labels which category each item belongs to, and I can re-order the list as I desire. You can also assign dates to them, but I tend not to work that way: anything with a deadline gets assigned a date(s) and put in my calendar.

The Photographers' Ephemeris

A rather obscure app, but a highly valuable one to photographers. Specify a location and a date, and TPE will show you sunrise and sunset times and directions. You can also select a time of day to show exactly what angle (horizontal and vertical) the sun will be at that time. The app isn't cheap, but it exceedingly useful for planning shoots.

And finally ...

App Control

I don't generally do games, but air traffic control ones are an honourable exception. This is the most realistic-looking one I've found. Addictive.

Oh, and if you're a very organised (read: borderline OCD) person like me, my final tip is not to do what I did initially and put all your apps into folders grouped by logical category. Because you then have two clicks both in and out to access and exit them. As you might have noticed earlier, I now have most of my apps in folders (still quicker than lots of separate screens), but my most-used ones are not in folders. Between the six you get on the dock at the bottom, and the ten I have at the top of the home screen, I have instant access to my most-used ones (the other two are just loose as I currently have the space for them there):