Review: Instapaper for iPad

There are many times throughout the day that I see a website that I want to flip through, or an article I want to read, but I don’t have the time to read it. I used to leave these tabs open on my screen, but since Firefox and Chrome both have ram leak issues, eventually, I’d just close down the windows and never read the articles. I had heard about Instapaper before,  but up until recently, I didn’t know what it was. Then I did some searching, and sure enough, it was the answer to my prayers.

Instapaper is a web service that allows users to save web pages for later reading. You sign up for a free account, then bookmark a web page. Anytime you see a site you want to read later, you click on the “Read Later” bookmark and voila, the page is saved on Instapaper’s site. Turns out that they also have an iPhone and iPad version, named Instapaper Free [iTunes Link] and Instapaper Pro [iTunes Link].

I started my mobile Instapaper experiment with the free version for the iPhone. This version is only on the iPhone, but it works just like the iPad version pictured above. Every page you save loads up almost immediately when you turn on the program. Click on an article and a text version of the same page comes up for your reading pleasure. I liked it so much that I loaded up the Pro version on my iPad, which is available for both platforms. The Pro version adds folders for storing old articles, a dictionary word look up feature, and a few others. It’s well worth the $4.99.

This is one of those apps that changes your life. I can now read anything I want whenever I want, at my convenience. This may seem like a simple thing, but I wasted hours every day looking at, saving, then reading pages, killing my daily productivity in the process. Now I can just pull my iPad out, read the site whenever I have time, and not worry about it. It’s arguably the best $4.99 I’ve spent on an App.

If you’ve got a similar problem to mine, then take a look at Instapaper. The service itself is free, and it’s only $5 for the App, so I say it’s a good buy. Don’t believe me? Go for the free version on the iPhone to test it out. Trust me when I say that it will change the way you surf the web.