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The 18 Best iPad Apps For SMBs

Start The Discussion | Jake Widman | April 27, 2010 08:01 AM

With new apps coming every day, the potential business utility of Apple iPad lies ahead. Selecting the right iPad apps is key to transforming Steve Jobs' latest toy into a valuable mobile business tool. To guide you in finding apps that will boost your productivity, we've identified the 18 best iPads apps for small and midsize businesses.

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Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs -- and then there's databases. Bento is a personal database designed for the Mac, but it's capable enough to handle the needs of many small businesses. Filemaker, Bento's developer, is quick to keep pace with new platforms, and has had an iPhone app for a while. Now they've added a version of Bento for the iPad. It doesn't have a lot more features than the iPhone version, but it does do a nice job of exploiting the extra screen real estate on the iPad. For example, turning the iPad to landscape mode lets you see the complete list of records as well as an individual record side by side. (Turning it to portrait mode displays just one record.) It also has three new themes with fonts designed for the larger iPad screen.

Bento for iPad can be used as a standalone database app, and it comes with 25 templates for such business purposes as inventory, contact management, and expense tracking. But if you're lucky enough to be running your business on a Mac, it can synchronize with Bento 3 for OS X. As with the iPhone version, Filemaker warns that memory limitations can affect the mobile version's ability to work with large Bento 3 databases.

If you already have iTunes, go directly to Bento.

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