You may be surprised to learn that the standard iPad onscreen keyboard has dozens of alternative letters and symbols from several different languages hiding behind its exterior. Wondering how to create an upside-down question mark such as used in Spanish? Put accents over a letter? Create a pound or degree sign? They’re all there, just a long key press away!

Very few apps (applications) on the iPad run in the background, meaning that most of them simply stop when you hit the home button and exit the application. But with the iPod app on your iPad, you can have music in the background, and use any other application while listening to that iPod background music. And you can pop up a pop-up iPod controller (like a little iPod remote control) while you are using any other application, without ever leaving that app.!

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to shuffle your music on your iPad, well, you’re not alone. Apple could hardly have made it more confusing. First, you can’t shuffle your music on your iPad in iTunes, because iTunes isn’t even where your music is on the iPad! Your music is in the iPod app on your iPad, and you can shuffle your music on the iPod on the iPad, but you have to know the secret. So, here’s the secret.

In a much-hoped for move, Skype and Skype Out now work with 3G, at least on the iPhone and iPad. The bad news is that Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G will cost you money (after a free period that lasts through at least August, and maybe through the end of the year).

Yes, we now have a 3G iPad, and yes, we will post our reviews of it, and about transferring data from one iPad to another, and about the differences between the iPad original and iPad wifi + 3G. But for now, we wanted to quickly answer the question burning on everyone’s mind: just what is it like to sign up for AT&T’s no contract 3G data plan, and is it really as easy as they claim, and does it work! We’ve included lots of screen shots.

The one thing that people have really been missing on the iPad (well, besides a camera) has been handwriting recognition for the iPad. Well, the good people at PhatWare, who really know handwriting recognition (they are the authors of, among others, the awesome Calligrapher software) have just released their handwriting recognition app for the iPad.

Bloggers considering the Apple iPad tablet will be thrilled by the Wordpress for iPad app. The Wordpress app for the iPad makes posting to your Wordpress site (or your Wordpress blog on the Wordpress.com site) a snap

Many people have told us that they are eagerly awaiting our Apple iPad reviews. This is the first Apple iPad review… We wanted to show you that it is not only possible to work on the iPad, but it is even possible to write an article, and post to a website in Wordpress, all using the native iPad applications. This will be the first of several hands-on iPad reviews we will write to answer the question what is iPad.

If you are just setting up a brand new iPad, you may find that when you first try to sync it with iTunes, you get this stranger error message: “You backtracked too far. The application backtracking limit of 5 has been exceeded.” It may also have what looks like a link to “MZFinance”.