iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

TextNow is currently available for free, and if you'd like to do free texting on your iPad or iPod touch, this app certainly deserves consideration. They actually give you a free phone number that others can use to send text messages to your iPad or iPod touch. It also can be used to send picture messages. It does have ads, but you can use in-app purchasing to upgrade to a version without apps ($5.99 per year). Here's a video demo.

The Ultimate PDF Reader Roundup

By Werner Ruotsalainen

(Note that a cleaned up and extended, easy-to-digest version of this article – without the lengthy section on the chart – will be published in the iPhone / iPad Buyer's Guide. Go buy it ;-) ).

The iPad offers an excellent way of reading PDF files. While you can do this right in Safari (with web based PDF's) or can freely download Apple's own iBooks, it may be still worth checking out how almost all (!) the currently available PDF reader solutions. Knowing what the alternative PDF readers are capable of is essential as reading online PDF's with Safari lacks any kind of features like in-document searching. In addition, iBooks lacks some essential features too.