Bookmarking on the iPhone and iPod touch works well enough in Safari, but it can clearly be improved upon. The latest app that tries to provide a better bookmarking experience on the iPhone is Read It Later (iTunes link), which also syncs with the company’s desktop browser plugins and bookmarklets. Read It Later is similar to Instapaper. It lets you save pages through a bookmarklet in Safari and then read them in the app’s built-in browser, both as a cached copy of the web page, or in a text-only mode.
Features
Because the iPhone doesn’t allow users to easily copy and paste a code snippet into a bookmark (yet), installing the bookmarklet is a bit complicated, but the company provides a good set of instructions, and installing the bookmarklet shouldn’t take more than a minute.
Once you have installed the bookmarklet, you just have to open up your bookmarks folder, click the Read It Later bookmark, and the page will be saved for you. Because your data is saved on the company’s server, you can easily sync bookmarks from multiple devices.
In the app itself, you can then read your bookmarked stories in the built-in browser at your leisure. You can also sort your reading list by date, title, or site.
Read It Later’s most important feature, however, is that it caches the content of your saved Web pages and lets you read it offline. Thanks to this, you can catch up on some of your reading while on a plane, for example.
Pro Version
The paid version, which costs $2.99 (iTunes link), adds a number of great features to the app, including a ‘Tap To Save’ bookmarklet that allows you to save any link on a given page (see this video for how it works), a full-screen reader that hides the Read It Later bookmarks, the ability to share links on various social bookmarking services, and an unread count on the apps icon on the iPhone’s home screen.
Verdict
Read It Later’s closest competitor is probably Instapaper, which also offers a free and pro version (at $9.99). Both apps are very similar, and Instapaper has a dedicated following that swears by the product. We like both apps, and would recommend that you try the free version of both Read it Later and Instapaper to see which one works best for you. For us, Read It Later’s ‘Tap to Save’ bookmarklet is a killer feature in the pro version, but not everybody will really need this.
