Everybody knows why we buy iPads. It’s because when Steve Jobs holds up a piece of electronic equipment, we are all conditioned to buy it at our earliest opportunity. Well, that and the fact that he just happens to make some of the coolest electronic devices known to man. The iPad is just the latest in a long line of neat and sweet little gadgets that have changed the way we view the gizmos that we carry around with us. It can store all sorts of neat apps for blasting aliens, rescuing princesses, and maneuvering abstract objects on quests to obtain other abstract objects. It also has tons of games, too.

But are we nothing more than game playing robots who buy technologies like the iPad out of a compulsion to play games on some kind of hardware device? Are there any truly great applications that one can use, in order to justify purchasing the iPad instead of a tablet PC or even just a basic, old fashioned laptop? There are, in fact. Some good applications that you might consider having in your iPad are “video converter for iPad” that allows you to convert xvid videos so that they could be played on iPad, “iWorks” that is similar to Open Office for word processing and spreadsheets tasks, VLC which is the best media player that you could have in your iPad, filezilla FTP client to access to FTP servers and file transfers and Ares which is a P2P network to allow you to share digital media and files over a virtual file sharing network.

In some cases, there are many other truly useful programs that one can download and install onto the iPad, which will allow them to build spreadsheets, track information relative to accounts (such as at doctor’s offices), and manage small details no matter where you are. In essence, the iPad is the iPhone’s big, uncommunicative brother.

So if you are thinking seriously about going out and buying an iPad, you might want to consider what you are actually going to use it for. If you just want to play games, why not just get a PSP or a DS, which specialize in things of that nature? If you want a lovely game playing device that you can justify on your expense account, however, the iPad might be just the “I’m basically an adult, but here’s a shout out to my inner child” kind of gizmo. The ability to both work and play is wonderful.