UPDATE: Please note that this article is quite outdated and the applications are vastly different after many updates. Here’s a fresh review of Instapaper, our current choice.

What a pleasant morning it was, as I saw major upgrades for Read it Later and Instapaper right in my App Store app. Both clients are slowly coming out of their shell, and are diversifying in features so much so that it’s a little difficult to choose from either of them.

Let’s start with Instapaper 2.0

Marco Arment has been talking about Instapaper 2.0 for a while now, and I think he kept to his promise of making 2.0 awesome. It really is. From an aesthetic point of view, Instapaper keeps its general look, but everything is easier on the eyes (even the icon!). Even the dark interface, which is meant for reading in low light, has gone through refinements.

From a features perspective, I think the biggest news is shared articles. But before that, Instapaper 2.0 supports folders. You can create and manage folders for articles right on the device itself. But there’s particular kind of folder that interests me the most, and that’s shared articles. I can finally read through articles shared by my friends just by entering their username. If you want to share an article, simply hit the star button while reading and it will go to all those who’ve subscribed to your feed. Perhaps Smoking Apples can have their own shared feed of long articles (Instapaper users add “smokingapples”).

Apart from the above feature Instapaper has got a lot of little features that really make the client more efficient, including background updating, a new storage engine, and the ability to download graphical versions on the fly. Most of these features are restricted to the Pro version, so if you’re riding the free bandwagon, it’s time to switch. At $4.99 for a limited time, it’s a fairly good deal.

And then to Read it Later 1.3

I’ve written about this update a while ago, and was pretty excited to get my hands on the update. Read it Later 1.3 completely revamps the user interface, with a brand new startpage, better colours, and a user interface better suited for reading. Trust me it feels better than the screenshots. You can now wade through archives, and keep an eye on the ‘currently reading’ section.

When it comes to features, the one I’m most excited about is the scrollbar, which allows you to quickly skim through large articles. Okay I admit, it would have been nice if RiL had Instapaper’s tilt-scrolling feature (slurrp!). Read it Later’s sharing features have been taken to the next level, integrating with Tweetie, Twittelator, and TwitterFon Pro as well as a better overall layout. The email sheets are still not the 3.0 in-app mail sheets, but I’ve been assured it was just bad timing. There’s also multiple page support, which much better implementation than Instapaper (although not as compatible with sites).

Overall Read it Later 1.3 is a stunning upgrade, all of which will take your ‘laters’ to the next level. At $2.99 for the Pro version, it’s an even better deal. But does it stand up to Instapaper 2.0?

Which one?

I gave this decision considerable thought, since I’m going to spend a major amount of time reading articles. Like I said, I’m developer-agnostic and have no problem ditching one platform for another. I’ve been using both of them interchangeably for the last couple of hours, and while I’m completely floored by Instapaper’s implementation of the shared articles, Read it Later stays as my client of choice. The main reason for swaying me in this direction is the better reading interface. The text view is much cleaner than Instapaper, as it weeds out the unnecessary items, leaving just text from the article. Compared to that Instapaper can make a mess of things. I also like the easy switching between Text and Web modes, both of which are offline at any given moment. What’s more, it also supports sharing to my favourite twitter client Twittelator (which in turn supports Read It Later for adding articles).

A die-hard Instapaper fan sent me an email a few days ago, when Instapaper announced the sharing features. “It’s not that easy to beat Marco Arment”, he said. Here’s my reply: “Nate Weiner is no slouch either”.