A whole six months after the last major update, Read it Later 2.0 shows up in my App Store updates with just one line of description. “Completely rewritten and redesigned to be faster, more stable, and significantly easier to use.” Exciting.

So what’s changed? Pretty much everything. While it still keeps with the essence of what it was before, the new look is definitely sleeker, polished, and modern. Kind of like what goes through the average person in one of those TV make-overs. And the icon is finally something not to be embarrassed about.

Aside from visual aesthetics, Nate Weiner has really taken into consideration all the little quirks of the earlier one, and made the entire reading process a whole lot smoother. For pure reading purposes, the view is slightly tweaked to get in more text. Even the landscape view dynamically resizes to keep the same font size thereby allowing you to read more. To bring up the text controls, you now have to double-tap the content (instead of having to bring up the hud). The onscreen hud itself, when hidden in fullscreen is now brought up by tapping the little pagecurl at the bottom left. Much better than the quirky tap-at-the-top while-avoiding-the-status-bar behaviour. The onscreen hud itself is optimised, with only one switcher between text and web view. If you want the live version, just refresh. I’m not sure how useful this is, but there’s a little article switcher at the top, kind of like a joystick. It’s interesting, but maybe not necessary.

The highlight of this update, is tags. While Instapaper went the folders way, Read it Later depends on tags for organisation. To set up your tags you need to simply swipe an article in the list view. This brings up hidden controls for much like Tweetie for iPhone does. You can redownload the article, share it, mark it as read, or edit the tag. Add your tag, and the next time it will show up in the ‘most used’ section. You can have tagged articles not show up in the main list, if that’s the way you want to organise your articles. Smooth as smooth can be, but personally speaking I’m a straight up single list kind of guy, so this feature doesn’t affect me much. Perhaps it will help me sort guitar tablature from my regular reading material—I need to think about this more.

Is Read it Later 2.0 worthy of that one line update description it comes with? Hell yeah. As a regular user I can see how the UI tweaks are going to be of great help. Moreover, the pixel polish is always appreciated on a device like the iPhone, so kudos to the developer for pulling that off. $4.99 for the Pro version, and a free version available for testing.

Which brings me to Instapaper. Yes, I have to mention it.

If there’s one feature missing in Read it Later, it’s sharing of articles—and I don’t mean that in a single article to twitter kind of way. Instapaper 2.0 brought along a brilliant sharing feature, one that I’ve always wanted in such an app. What’s even more amazing, is you can subscribe to a bunch of popular feeds like Gimme Something To Read and The New Yorker, and have a constant flow of articles to read on the go. I know it goes to making the app more like an RSS reader than a personal reading assistant, but it’s still helpful when you’re stuck in a long queue and you need some interestingness to while your time away with. And they’re really good articles. Instapaper also has improved its text parser, and it intelligently allows images to be included in the articles.

[tweetmeme] Which is why I’ve been using both Read it Later, and Instapaper regularly on my iPhone, their icons residing side by side on my home screen. I’d hate to choose between the two as they’re both very good apps and services, but if at gunpoint, I’d definitely go with Read it Later over Instapaper because of the better reading experience. But it will be hard to let go of the ready availability of good reading material that Instapaper provides. Both apps cost $4.99. The choice is how you see yourself using the apps; I’d take both.