I have an iPad mini and have a number of apps on it, such as Notability and SpringPad (never got into Evernote, although I tried). Any other apps that people find useful?

I really like iThoughtsHD for mind mapping. It's very useful when planning any kind of writing, or a presentation, or a paper, or even a thesis chapter. I wouldn't be without it now. And I never used mind mapping in the past.

Another very useful app is Goodreader, which is a superb PDF viewer, and lets you annotate PDFs on the iPad - particularly if you have a (can be bought cheaply) squidgy stylus to scribble on the screen. With this app I find it much easier to read PDFs on my iPad than on a desktop or laptop computer.

And my final big tip is WriteRoom, which is a distraction free writing environment. Unlike Word it doesn't have lots of fancy formatting things, and is all about getting the words i.e. content down, not fiddling with the styles. And that is very good for productivity purposes. You can customise the display. I like mine green text on a black background - child of the 80s ha!

I blogged about the iPad as a productivity tool on my academic blog at

https://vivsacademicblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/the-ipad-as-a-productivity-tool-and-some-recommended-apps/

and

https://vivsacademicblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/more-thoughts-on-the-ipad-as-a-productivity-tool/

Thanks for that Bilbo! I downloaded Goodreader, it looks neat! My only problem - for the time being - is that when I want to annotate a document I can't seem to get the tap right to bring up the menu options. Any tips on that?

A couple of Thesis Whisperer posts which might be relevant

Not sure quite what mode you're in, but I find that a short tap makes the menu bar at the side appear for me. Or if you tap and hold on a word it selects that. Hope that helps! Oh and if you have a stylus and want to scribble on it select the wavy line from the menu bar to be able to scribble all over the page with handwriting.

I don't annotate that often to be honest, but use Goodreader as a PDF reader an awful lot. I find I get through things I probably wouldn't read otherwise without it.