For me this is one of the best, and most underused/underestimated apps available on the Play Store. As soon as I discovered it, I knew that it was a gem. The app is basically a place where you can quickly store new articles and, pictures and videos so that you can view them later. It is effortless and when you do not have enough time you can – read it later. It truly is a must have on all my devices.
The pocket app has a basic UI which is great because it is simple and doesn’t get in the way of you and your personal content. once you have saved it to Pocket you do not require an internet connection to view your content, so you can take it anywhere with you whether you are on the train, in a cafe, on a plane or even in the toilet (not a good idea) you can view your content seamlessly. It consists of two sections; section one is ‘My List’ and this is where all of your content lives, whatever you save to ‘Pocket’ will be aggregated here. The second section is a feature they introduced late last year which is where the app starts to register your interests based on the pages and content which you save and it suggests other materials which you might be interested in. I don’t seem to use this feature very much but when I have swiped over to the left I have to admit that the content which was aggregated by the app is quite similar to the content which I like.
Another thing that I like about the this app is that you can customize your reading experience, what I mean by this is that once you have saved the article to your feed you can then alter the font size of the article, change the font style, you can change the background color so that it makes it easier to read in the dark, if you like to read before bed, and a huge feature which I have used on the odd occasion is the Text-to-Speech (TTS) services. I think that it is a brilliant service which they offer especially when it comes to consumption of texts.
Pocket can not only store your content to view later, it can also organize your content for you. This is because it uses ‘Tags’ which categorizes your content so that you do not have to scroll through a list of all the other items which you have saved. I fond this extremely useful because I can can quickly find the item I am looking for just by swiping out the slide out menu on the left, selecting tags, and then selecting the relevant category which I store it in. I find it very useful as I can quickly fin what I was looking for and continue where I left off.There is also another way of categorizing your items and that is to ???? the item. This is mainly for those items which you want to keep separate and have even easier access to. You can still add tags to the item but it will also live in the ‘Favorites’ sections which you can also have access to from the slide out menu on the left. I use this to narrow the search for some of the articles which I find the most interesting. With Pocket you can also archive you articles, videos and pictures once you have finished reading them but do not want to delete them just yet. The best thing about pocket is its powerful search functionality in the app. This is because you can search in your Listed items which are saved, and also switch to searching in your archived items as well.
In Pocket you can now receive notifications from your favorite news sources or from new interesting people like the CEO of Spotify, and internet bloggers. This is a great feature because it helps to promote bloggers and also you can discover new and interesting content to spark a whole version of you which you never realized you had. You will be notified of any new articles or blog posts which have been created and they will be straight to your device!
This leads into my next point which is the cross-platform functionality of the product; you can get the Android/iOS app, it supports Windows desktop, Mac OS, Chrome OS and also there is a nifty Chrome extension which is always handy. But that’s not all folks… it even supports the Window Phone market as well! I think this is one of Pockets’ greatest achievements as they have come a long way to provide the best mobile reading experience ever! OK OK, I know that was a lot of exclamation marks but it gets me excited! (sorry I just had to that last one ????). You can either Login through a username which you create, an email address and or you can sign in with Google. The best thing is that it syncs across all your device no matter what they are. all you have to do is sign-in and you have all your content saved from the cloud at your fingertips on all of your devices.
One last thing about Pocket is that there is a Premium version of the app, it is $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year. This might seem a little on the price side but I assure you that you do extra features. One features is that whatever items you list on the app in the future, will become a permanent item and will not be deleted. This is great because of the source does decide to delete the link, suggested tags for quick organisation instead of hand typing all of the tags, search by full-text, tag, author, or topic, you will have access to advanced search operators, you can sort items by relevance or date saved for more convenience, and finally you can view recent searches.
All in all, I think that this is a great app which deserves some attention as it will help you as you will never miss that article again! (There it is again). I would definitely recommend this 10/10 to friends and family as it is really helpful when you in a rush or just do not have enough time.
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