Instapaper has been a must have app ever since the App Store launched. The convenience of quickly saving selected web pages and then reading them is something useful for anyone with an iPhone. If all this is alien to you, let me explain what Instapaper does in the first place.
Once you create your account at Instapaper.com, you store a bookmarklet in your Safari bookmarks bar. If you stumble across an interesting article on the web, you hit the “read later” bookmark, and the page is automatically saved to your Instapaper account.
Moving on to the iPhone, you launch the Instapaper (free) app, which then syncs all your saved articles and saves them for offline reading. The syncing is beautifully done so that it doesn’t really store the full blown page itself, but only its contents. The app will weed out any navigational items and sidebars and only give you the text of the article. It’s not always perfect, but it gets the job done.
With the free app you can do all the syncing, view in horizontal mode, and set it to pull graphics along with the articles if you want. For most purposes, you can be content with using the free app (I did for all these months now). It doesn’t annoy you with ‘buy me’ messages, nor does it have any ads.
Instapaper Pro on the other hand adds those features add some serious ‘wow’ factor to this app. If you thought tilt scrolling would be a gimmicky feature, you have got to check this out. The scrolling is butter smooth and is super useful. I feel like one of those lazy people in the WALL•E while using the tilt scrolling. It’s that good.
Other features include changing the typefaces, size, and colour. It also resumes reading where you last left off which is a very handy feature. You can also disable the horizontal reading mode, which is handy if you like reading while lying down.
Is Instapaper free [iTunes link] worth it? Hell yes! No question about that. Is Instapaper Pro [iTunes link] worth it? If you use Instapaper regularly, I’d say it is definitely a good investment. At $9.99 it certainly isn’t following the downward trend of the App Store, but that’s the price you pay for actual useful apps. As the developer says though, try the free version first, if you haven’t already.
However, the main reason I think Instapaper Pro is worth it, is because it has a strong future. The developer Marco Arment has been focussing perfecting Instapaper instead of moving to developing new apps. The version 2.0 is set to release soon. Besides that, the ecosystem is also growing. Tweetie was the first app to support Instapaper, and now EventBox is going to follow suit with the next update. All this points to a great future for Instapaper, and I think the best way to enjoy it is to get the Pro version.
PS: I get to give just one of you readers a copy of the Pro version, so the first one to comment gets it.
