Advertised as “the best way to experience the web, email, photos, and video,” the iPad features a 9.7 inch Multi-Touch display, and is only 0.5 inch thin.  With a weigh of only 1.5 pounds, the iPad is incredibly portable.

As of last week, the iPad can run almost 140,000 of the apps on the App Store — even the ones that you’ve already downloaded on your iPhone and iPod touch.  A new app to the iPad is iBooks, which allows users to read and buy books from the built-in iBookstore.

The iPad is reasonably priced, with models starting at $499 for the 16GB + Wi-Fi and topping out at $829 for the 64GB + Wi-Fi + 3G.  The Wi-Fi only models ship in March, with the 3G models following in April.

Engadget published a good hands-on evaluation of the iPad, with the pluses (beautiful screen, super fast CPU, great eBook reading experience) and the minuses (no multi-tasking, no camera and no Adobe Flash).  For all the technical specs and the promo video, visit Apple’s website.

Mixology: Drink Recipes – a good collection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks to get you through the holiday season

Slacker Holiday Radio – Unlimited free holiday tunes from 11 different holiday radio stations.  Everything from classic holiday songs to contemporary anti-holiday tunes can be found here.

Elf Command – Rush hour in Santa’s workshop!  Help the robot elves sort the presents to take to good boys and girls.  Fun for kids (some adults might like it too).

Do Not Press The Red Button – Christmas Edition! – Just get it.  It will make you laugh at least once.  We promise.

Dr. Seuss Camera – The Grinch Edition – OK.  So this one isn’t free, but it’s a lot of fun.  You can take a photo of yourself and then put your face on the Grinch’s body and send a “Grinchmas Card.”  You don’t have to be a Grinch if you don’t want, though.  You can also choose from other Dr. Seuss characters like Cindy-Lou Who and the Grinch’s dog, Max.

Also!  Dropbox is releasing a free iPhone App soon that will let you to access your files from your phone.

Now Mactracker is available as an iPhone app, which is perfect for users who want a quick reference guide to all Apple hardware (and also a very useful tool for our on-site Mac support techs).

Skype also offers a monthly subscription service as well as a service called Pay As You Go, which allows you to call landlines and mobiles at a very low cost per minute.  International calls with the Pay As You Go credit start at around two cents per minute.

Things for the iPhone also syncs wirelessly with the desktop version of Things using Wi-Fi.  It’s easy to use, has a nice, elegant design — just an all-around great GTD App.

Tatomic is an action puzzle game with great graphics and 3 different game modes: Critical Mass, Radioactive Survival and Puzzle Mode.  It has a good degree of difficulty so even the free version, Tatomic Lite, which has 10 levels instead of 30, will keep you playing for quite a while.

Ergo, Tweetie’s place in our Top 10 iPhone Apps.

The look of this App isn’t amazing, but I can view and use my different Twitter accounts, which I couldn’t with Twitterific.  Also, I can do custom searches, which is helpful.

Say you’re in a bar (or restaurant, or shop, or any location where music is playing) and you hear a great song, and you want to know who the band is.  All you have to do is hold your iPhone up in the air and Shazam will identify it for you.  No need to bother the bartender.

The Pandora Radio App is personalized radio for your iPhone.  It helps you create “stations” based on your favorite bands, songs or style of music.  If you don’t like one of the songs that Pandora suggests, you just select the thumbs down and Pandora will further refine the selections to fit your taste.  You can also bookmark songs that you like and create stations from them or buy them in iTunes.