Health, fitness, travel, and navigation
Best iPad apps: Health and fitness
Screens are half the reason we’re so out of shape, but your iPad can help you get back in shape, too. The apps below will help you work out, eat right, and we have a few tips for you if you’re into sports.
Elevate Brain Training
Elevate is one of the best brain-training apps out there. It’s designed to improve your focus, memory, and math skills with a series of entertaining activities. The cognitive tests also get more challenging as you improve, regardless of which of the 30 you choose.
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Yoga Studio
Choose from a range of HD video classes for different abilities and improve your flexibility, strength, balance, and relaxation. You can even craft your own classes and schedules.
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MyFitnessPal Calorie & Diet Tracker
Keep a really close eye on everything you consume and get a calorie count along the way. This app covers more than 3 million foods, and you can use it to track your exercise as well.
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7 Minute Workout
You don’t need any equipment to stay fit with these 7 minute workouts and they can be performed anywhere. A little gamification and progress tracking encourages you to work out daily.
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FitStar Personal Trainer
FitStar Personal Trainer will save you the expensive costs associated with gym memberships and fitness gurus and instead helps you customize your own workouts to get the results you’re after.
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WebMD for iPad
Combining a symptom checker, first aid advice, pill identification, drug and treatment information, and a local directory of healthcare professionals, this is the best free healthcare app.
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First Aid by American Red Cross
It’s empowering to know exactly what to do in an emergency, and it helps you take the right action and keep a cool head. This app is full of easy to follow advice for coping with accidents.
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Coach’s Eye ($5)
Record your baseball swing or your tennis game, and you can watch the video back in slow motion, compare two videos side by side, and then annotate and share the results to help you improve.
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iPracticeBuilder ($5)
To master any sport you’ve got to get your training plan right. This app allows you to create drills and plans to cover multiple sports, share them with teammates or coaches, and access video coaching.
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Best iPad apps: Travel and navigation
Most of us don’t use our iPad around town (unless you have a LTE enabled version), but that doesn’t mean an iPad isn’t a great tool to help you get around or understand where you are. Here are our favorite travel apps.
Airbnb
Airbnb is one of the most popular traveling apps for people who aren’t too fond of hotels or just want to save a buck or two. The iPad app makes it easy to see what you’re getting into, and you can really analyze the rental’s photos before you make a decision. You can search by a variety of factors, including the number of rooms, location, amenities, and more. Airbnb boasts 600,000 listings in more than 34,000 cities, so you’re bound to find the perfect spot for your next trip.
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BringFido
Want to travel with your best friend? BringFido makes it easy to find and make reservations at a slew of pet-friendly hotels scatter across the globe. The app will also list nearby dog parks, available sitters, and veterinarians with a host of reviews and rates from other dog owners.
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Google Maps
We’d hate to re-open the Google Maps vs. Apple Maps wound again, so we’ll just say this: Download Google Maps. It’s accurate, thorough, and offers free turn-by-turn voice navigation.
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TripIt
Having TripIt on your iPad is like having your own special travel itinerary folder (the one you plan to make for every trip but never do). It keeps hotel, car rental, and flight information in place and in chronological order.
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Kayak
Kayak Pro is like the Google of travel planning. It’s the smart search engine for trip planning that will help you find flights, cars, and hotels to fit your schedule and budget. It aggregates multiple airlines and services.
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Hipmunk
Finding flights and hotels is easy on Hipmunk. The app offers handy visualizations, helps you land in a comfy hotel for cheap, and organizes flights by its trademark “agony” rating to minimize duration, layovers and price.
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Google Translate
If Google has an app for it, you should probably have that app. Google Translate can handle text, voice, handwriting, and text in images. It works with over 70 languages no matter the input.
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mytaxi
Never wind up stranded when you have your iPad in hand. In as few as two taps, you can get a taxi on its way to your location. Follow the taxi in real time, rate drivers, and pay by app.
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MyTopo Maps by Trimble Outdoors
Who says you can’t take technology out into the wilderness? MyTopo Maps will make your iPad a necessity for outdoor exploration, with maps of terrain and plan your trip with a powerful place search.
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Spyglass ($6)
If you end up getting lost, you can count on Spyglass. It equips you with a GPS, compass, finder, tracker, and AR navigation to ensure you’re never lost, even in strange locales.
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OpenTable
No time to whip up a meal at home? No problem. There’s plenty of restaurants around town waiting to serve you. There are over 20,000 participating food stops and is the industry standard for getting reservations.
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Yelp
We probably don’t need to explain Yelp to you, as it’s well-known service at this point. But you should have the app so you can find places to check out, hidden gems around the city, and read reviews to avoid bad food.
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Zagat
Zagat has been a standard setter for restaurant reviews for some time now. Acquired by Google in 2011, its digital presence has gotten better. The app offers reviews and Google Street View panoramas so you can places.
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StubHub
Nights that you spend sitting inside could become an experience in town. Check StubHub for cheap tickets to events and snagging some seats. You might catch a show you would have missed.
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