The iPad, like the iPhone, was built with applications in mind. We take a look at the top 10 business apps to see if it’s worth delving into the world of the iPad when it becomes available in May.

There’s no denying that Apple has developed a platform that has revolutionised the use of applications on mobile devices.

First it was the iPhone, now it’s the iPad, but how well does Apple’s new tablet cope with applications?

We take at the top 10 business applications for iPad and see whether it’s worth investing to aid working on the move.

Numbers (Price TBC)

Numbers is the Excel-like application from Apple’s iWork suite, and works wonderfully well on the iPad.

Like on Keynote and Pages, Apple gives you a selection of different templates to get you started, including a budget, invoice, employee schedule and expense report. There’s also a blank one if you’d rather start from scratch.

As with Microsoft Excel, you can add multiple tabs and create graphs, placing them directly into the body of the spreadsheet.

Instead of inputting all of the formulas in manually, there’s a list of pre-installed functions that you simply tap and then select the cells involved in the calculation.

Rating: 5/6

Air sharing HD (£5.99)

Air Sharing HD allows you to access your computer’s files wherever you are, providing you have an internet connection.

If you’re on the same wireless network, you can mount the iPad as a drive on your computer to drag and drop files from one to the other.

If you have internet access, you can also access your computer from a web browser.

Whichever way you access your computer, you can view, print and share any of the files too.

Most document types are supported, including iWork, Microsoft, PDF, Adobe Illustrator, RTF, plain text and movie, music and image files.

Rating: 5/6

Jump Desktop (£5.99)

Jump Desktop is another remote desktop application for the iPad. It is handy because it supports the iPad’s larger screen, meaning your computer screen is presented in its full glory on your iPad.

Jump Desktop is seamless to set up (providing you don’t have a computer running on Windows Home, Home Premium or Starter), especially if you have a Google account.

If you don’t have a Google account, you can still set up the RDP using a host name or IP address.

A massive advantage of Jump Desktop over other RDP clients is that you don’t have to install anything on your computer.

Rating: 5/6

GoodReader (£0.59)

One thing that the iPad lacks is a decent file management application where you can preview and organise all of the files on your device.

Good Reader is exactly that and does it very effectively.

Files can be transferred between iPad and computer either using a Wi-Fi network or via cloud storage services such as Google Docs, Dropbox, an FTP server, MobileMe or an email server.

If you opt to turn the preview on, you can view a thumbnail of the document on your device. Tap it and ...