The Apple iPad. The name is a killing word — more than a product — it’s a statement, an idea, and potentially a prime mover in the world of consumer electronics. Before iPad it was called the Apple Tablet, the Slate, Canvas, and a handful of other guesses — but what was little more than rumor and speculation for nearly ten years is now very much a reality.

The iPad is something in between its monumental iPhone and wildly successful MacBook line — a usurper to the netbook throne, and possibly a sign of things to come for the entire personal computer market. We’re not going to go super deep into all of the bundled applications, but we feel quite a few deserve special mention. There are brand new applications that are hugely important to what the iPad is and does, and we wanted to take a moment to give an overview and opinion on what we believe stood out from the rest.

Air Video – Stream videos from the computer to the iPad

This free Air Video application will allow you to stream you entire movie collection from the computer to your iPad!

What is so cool about Air Video is its ability to convert from most video formats to a format that is acceptable by the iPad on the fly. It does this live conversion without having to pre-convert your entire video library.

Air Video application can share folders as well as iTunes play lists. It can convert on the fly or you can designate folders for conversion in advance. It allows for customization such as zoom, cropping and resolution changes as well. The server software is a free download for either Mac or Windows and is required to be running at all times on the machine you want to stream from.

To set up the Server, all you need to do is run the application and on the iPad, enter in the key code on the running server; as long as you are on the same WiFi network, you should be up and running. Set up is fairly straight forward and easy too.

HeartWise Blood Pressure Tracker for iPad

There are some things in life we have to do, even if we don’t want to. Visit the dentist, stop eating certain foods, and watching our health before it gets out of hand. Luckily, the iPad is starting to get some really good applications to help keep track of such things, and HeartWise Blood Pressure Tracker application is amongst the best of them.

The title pretty much says it all. HeartWise Blood Pressure Tracker keeps records of numerous things for you, including your systolic and diastolic blood pressure, your mean arterial pressure, a resting heart rate and your weight, either in pounds or kilograms. It also keeps track of your body mass index, should you want to watch your figure in the process.

Now, that doesn’t mean you strap your iPad to your wrist to read your pulse rate. Unfortunately, the device isn’t that high-tech; not yet, anyway.

Rather, you enter in statistics found out by checking your blood pressure on an actual machine, which you can find at a local pharmacy or doctor’s office. From there, HeartWise Blood Pressure Tracker keeps these numbers in easy-to-read charts, including spreadsheet forms, giving you the option to share them with your local physicians.

This application won’t be for everyone. If you don’t suffer from blood pressure problems or are still young, this probably won’t find much use on your tablet. However, it’s an essential tool for those who invest the $4.99 into it.

HeartWise Blood Pressure Tracker for iPad Features:

• Intuitive Data entry screen
• Track blood pressure, resting heart rate and weight
• Automatic calculation of Mean Arterial Pressure, Pulse Pressure and Body Mass Index
• Statistics reports show how your blood pressure along with other measurements change over a period of time
• Weight measurements
• Charts can be saved as a image file into your photo library
• Export data into spreadsheet

Check out the iPad version of the all-popular Plants Versus Zombies game!

Popularity: 40% [?]