I’ve been an avid iPad user for 30 months and counting. I still love and use my Pad a lot, but I also bought a new Surface RT. Will my Surface ever completely replace my iPad? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out. This blog series is aimed at comparing the two devices in all sorts of situations, from work to home, and analyzing the pros and cons of each. You can read other entries in the series using the links below.

• From iPad to Surface – Day 1: Acquisition & Setup
• From iPad to Surface – Day 2: Sandy Killed my Power
• From iPad to Surface – Day 3: Under the Hood
• Bonus Post: You Want to Buy a Surface, but What is Windows RT?
• Bonus Post: Developing Apps for Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8
• Bonus Page: Infragistics NetAdvantage for Windows UI – Developer Controls for Windows 8 & Windows RT

App Recommendations

There are over 700,000 apps in the Apple App Store. Over 250,000 of those are iPad apps. The Windows Store already has over 10,000 apps already and it’s only been officially open for a week. Given that Windows RT devices and Windows 8 PCs & laptops all use the same Windows Store, it’s easy to see how the Windows Store will eventually catch-up to iOS, especially given the sheer number of enterprise developers out there who already know Visual Studio, .NET, XAML and C#.

Bottom line? That’s a lot of apps to sift through. Sooner or later, you’ll need some help finding the best apps.

Word of mouth from friends & co-workers and social media are great ways to learn about cool apps, but both Apple & Microsoft want to make it easier for you to quickly get started with a great selection of useful apps & fun games. McDonald’s recommends that you super-size your meal. Microsoft & Apple do the same thing with their apps. Today I dive into these app recommendations on both the iPad and the Surface and look at the differences. Thanks to my colleague Brent Schooley for the topic idea.

Featured iPad Apps

The Apple App Store is very mature and it looks great! It is THE benchmark by which all other mobile stores are gauged. When you launch the App Store on an iPad, you can basically navigate through 5 main “tabbed” sections: Featured, Top Charts, Genius, Purchased and Updates. I love this layout. If updates are available for your apps, you’ll see a red circle with the number of updates on that tab. Top Charts is self-explanatory, and you can even see the top free & paid apps by sub-categories. Genius uses your purchased apps to provide recommendations based on what other iPad users bought. Purchased shows you the list of apps you’ve purchased/installed before, and you can filter down by apps you own but are not installed on this device.

The Featured page is really awesome. It basically has the following sections to help you find apps:

• A rotating banner with featured apps at the top.
• A scrolling list of new & noteworthy apps. There is some old stuff in there, so I’m not sure how this list is managed.
• Another scrolling list of app recommendations by category. For example, since Apple already acknowledged their maps suck, they have a section with other great mapping apps (including Bing) you can use instead. Another list is titled “Start Your Business” with productivity apps like Dropbox, , GoodReader, Quickoffice, LinkedIn and others. They used to have these apps listed under a category called “iPad @ Work”, which included SharePlus (the best mobile SharePoint client). I would easily add ReportPlus for on-device BI dashboard construction & sharing.
• What’s Hot is a section of apps that are trending / seeing a lot of downloads. Again, it’s unclear how some apps make it to this section.
• The last section at the bottom is the best, it includes several app lists worth looking at:
  • Apps Starter Kit: What every iPad user should get, including Amazon Mobile, Facebook, Evernote, Flipboard (my favorite), Netflix, and many more.
  • Games Starter Kit: Same idea, but this time for games, including Angry Birds Space, Cut the Rope, Where’s My Water, Fruit Ninja, Words with Friends, Plants vs. Zombies and many more.
  • Apps Made by Apple: Tim Cook’s shameless plugs: iBooks, Remote, Pages, GarageBand, iMovie, Numbers, Keynote and a few more. many are free at least.
  • Great Free Apps: Apple giving kudos to great apps that don’t cost a dime: NBC, ABC Player, CNN (I detect a trend here) eBay, Fandango, IMDb, Flixter, etc.
  • There are also other lists to choose from and this section varies from time to time. Current entries include Election 2012 (for Americans), Educations apps, Editor’s Choice, Action Games, Benchmark Games, Huggable Heroes (whatever that is).

I love that the iOS App Store tells you if that app is already installed on your device. I have 350 apps & games on my iPad, so it’s good to know what is already there. The Surface doesn’t do that until you view each individual app page, and that’s annoying.

As I said, the Apple App Store is very mature and has a HUGE selection of apps. They really make it easy to find the good ones. The Windows Store has a lot of catching up to do.

Surface Picks

When you launch the Windows Store, you are greeted with the Spotlight section that features Microsoft’s app picks. This is visible on all Windows RT devices & Windows 8 computers. This is where Microsoft is currently showcasing the “blue chip apps” to reassure potential buyers that Surface is a serious contender. It includes Netflix, Skype, The New York Times and ABC News. They sound like obvious apps to have but, considering none of these exist in the Blackberry App World for the Playbook (AKA the saddest tablet ever), nothing should be taken for granted.

From this Spotlight section you can also see the top free apps, yet it baffles me why there is no direct shortcut to the top paid apps. New releases could be useful but it hardly seems to change these days. Since we’re in the first few days of the Surface, I really expected this list of new app releases to be updated daily, but that’s not the case. It actually looks quite stake despite the fact that hundreds of apps are being added every day.

Interestingly enough, if you open the Windows Store on a Surface Device, you get an extra section called “Surface Picks”. This section is NOT there on other Windows 8 computers. I have not had a chance to check if it’s there on other non-Microsoft Windows RT devices, let me know if you own one.

Surface Picks is just a list of apps that (I assume) Microsoft deems noteworthy for you to get started with your Surface. There are currently 29 apps visible in this list, including Xbox Smartglass, Skype & Netflix (again), Kindle, Evernote, eBay and others. Microsoft’s “Surface Picks” for games include Adera, Cut The Rope, Rocket Riot and a few more. Wait, no Angry Birds Space? Really? It’s available, how is this not a Surface pick???

There are some blatant omissions in this list, so allow to to extend Microsoft’s recommendations with “ActiveNick’s Additional Surface Picks”:

• NBC News
• USA Today
• MetroTwit
• Zinio
• Flixter
• ComiXology
• Fruit Ninja
• Angry Birds Space
• Geared

Conclusion: Microsoft really needs to up their game a few notches when it comes to Windows Store recommendations.

Day 4 Summary

Surface has a nice selection of apps, but it has a lot of catching up to do. I don’t think I’ll be ditching my iPad anytime soon, but the future is promising on Windows RT. As the selection of apps grows in the Windows Store, hopefully Microsoft will keep improving the store experience to help you find the gems across several categories.

If you have any questions about Surface, including suggestions for future topics to explore in this series, questions about my experiences with the Surface vs. iPad, or any other tablet, feel free to ask them in the comments section below, or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the right tools for you with the new NetAdvantage for Windows UI. You should also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Do you find the app recommendations useful on iPad or Surface? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to Day 5: Favorite Fridays]