iPad 2 required for Apple's new iMovie app, but GarageBand works on the iPad

The iPad 2 goes on sale today in the US, with Apple releasing two flagship new iPad apps to take advantage. iMovie and GarageBand are both live on the App Store, but only the latter works on the original iPad as well as the new model.

The apps are available to buy in the UK App Store for £2.99 each (here are links to iMovie and GarageBand), and are visible in the desktop version of the store. Search from your first-generation iPad, though, and you'll find only GarageBand.

We've been playing with it this morning, and it's just as impressive as the demo shown at last week's iPad 2 launch. Well, we say impressive: it'll be much better when proper musicians are using it, rather than hack journalists messing about with grungey riffs and bull-in-a-cymbal-shop drumming.

GarageBand lets you play virtual pianos, guitars, drums and basses, with a choice of pure instruments for musos, and 'Smart Instruments' for the rest of us. Proper guitars can be plugged into the iPad to use a variety of virtual amps, and you can wail through the device's built-in mic.

Songs can be mixed with up to eight tracks, with more than 250 loops available to mix and match. You can email songs in the AAC format, export them to iTunes on your computer, and send them to the Mac version of GarageBand if you're using that for fine-tuning.

We haven't been able to try iMovie today, naturally, but got hands-on with it at the iPad 2 launch last week. It's already available for the iPhone 4 and the newest iPod touch, but touchscreen video-editing is much better suited to the larger tablet screen.

The iPad version has a new 'Multi-Touch Precision Editor' to make cutting your clips easier, and lets you dig into audio waveforms when matching music to your home movies. There are new themes -- Neon, Simple and CNN iReport. The latter is designed for sending iMovies to CNN's citizen journalist service, interestingly.