There are a number of services out there that let you save articles to read later, but Read It Later has a plurality of the market, in addition to the most obvious name. That’s why the sudden announcement of a new product to replace Read It later came as such a shock. On Wednesday the company revealed Pocket, a new service that takes over where Read it Later left off.
Read It Later (now Pocket) has over 4.5 million users, who save 400,000 items every day. Despite being highly popular, it didn’t quite have the slick design of Instapaper or Readability. The new Pocket mobile app is beautiful, as is the new website. Best of all, it’s free and has no ads. No more premium version of the mobile app either.
Like similar solutions, Pocket will take the articles you save and strip out all the non-essential bits, like ads and social sidebars. Images and text are retained, and the new Pocket app even handles videos elegantly. Pocket downloads all the articles to local cache, so you can read with or without an internet connection.
I checked out Pocket on Android, and the design blows me away. It uses the Android 4.0 Holo UI in the best way possible. Pocket uses the established visual elements, but with its own distinct, minimalist style. The main article list has big thumbnails next to the title, and Pocket can even parse content to let you filter articles by whether or not they have video. The UI on tablets is equally gorgeous with big image-heavy preview tiles, the same great sorting options, and a clean reading interface.
Read It Later wasn’t in danger of dying off, but the move to Pocket is an admission that the product needed a refresh to stay at the head of the pack going forward. The new domain, GetPocket.com, will direct you to mobile apps for iOS and Android, but it also has a nice web interface for reading articles.
Get Pocket, via The Next Web
