While not as meaty or fully featured as the actual newspaper (or its website), The New York Times' first stab at an iPad reader is a clean and easy-to-read digest of handpicked news stories, features, and editorials. Whether in portrait or landscape orientation, NYT Editors' Choice scales nicely to your preference, delivering clear text, sharp photography, and simple commands that let you quickly change pages with a single tap or swipe.

USA TODAY for iPad isn't the most attractive digital newspaper on the device, emphasizing function over a print-like aesthetic, but what it does deliver is a lot of different content, currently without charge. Each of the paper's four familiar sections is packed with news stories and features, plus you can access stunning photo galleries, interactive polls, and section-specific bonus features like sports scores. USA TODAY is still something of a work in progress, though, as placeholders for stock quotes and a daily crossword puzzle have yet to replace their "coming soon" notices with actual content.

Stock market professionals and living room traders alike know and trust the Bloomberg brand for the latest market news and analysis, and the Bloomberg for iPad app luckily doesn't disappoint, offering a large amount of information out of the gate.

Your Mac does a lot of cool things straight out of the box: You can edit movies and make music, or turn to more mundane tasks like surfing the web and checking email. A tool for organizing scraps of digital information, however, isn’t built into the iLife suite--although it probably should be. And so the daftly named Green & Slimy has released Thoughts, an information manager designed to serve as a catch-all for your digital scraps, enabling you to store, search, and organize them in useful ways.