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I try to avoid writing listicles, but I suspect many an iPad was found under the Christmas tree this year and so I thought it could be helpful to showcase some of the apps that make the iPad a great business tool, in my opinion.

The Apple productivity suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) — Their names obviously refer to their Mac counterparts, but Apple’s equivalents of Word, Excel and Powerpoint respectively, prove more than adequate to work with Microsoft Office documents. Some of the complex formatting may get lost, but they work well enough to review work and even to start drafting ideas to be finished later on a PC. Moreover, they also work well on the iPhone, very handy in a pinch.

Draft (37signals) — The iPad’s large touchscreen clearly invites to scribble on it. Although there are many drawing/writing apps, this one is my favourite at the moment because there are no settings, so the path from thought to drawing is as short as possible. Other worthwhile options range from skeuomorphic notebooks (e.g. Penultimate) to full-fledged note-taking apps (e.g. Notes Plus and Notability)

GoodReader (Good.iWare) — Although the built-in Mail and iBooks apps generally deal just fine with PDF’s, GoodReader adds the ability to highlight and take notes, which makes it great for on-the-go reviewing. On top of that getting documents into it is easy: it syncs with a wide range of services including Dropbox and iCloud, and it’s possible to send a PDF received by mail directly to the app.

iA Writer (Information Architects) — This app is all about writing. Its premise is that good writing requires the least possible amount of distractions, so it presents just a blank screen, the keyboard and nothing else. Behind the scenes it syncs with Dropbox, making it a good choice to edit normal text files as well.

Instapaper — This app works with the instapaper.com website. A bookmarklet on the website allows you to save any webpage for reading later. The iPad app syncs with the website and downloads all the saved pages to the iPad, so you can read them comfortably on the couch or on a plane. Great for quickly capturing a long read during the day and going through it at night.

Of course, the iPad is great for non-business activities as well. Personal highlights here include Flipboard to keep up with various social networks and news, TripIt to keep track of your travel plans and your favourite newspaper app.