Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

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Pocket: consume all content offline on your mobile device

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

My smartphone doesn’t have a data plan because the last thing I want is to be able to check my email and facebook while I’m not behind my PC. I do like to read though, so I want to use my smartphone to read content I’ve previously somehow flagged as interesting.

I’ve tried many apps. Instapaper, Diigo, Readability and a few others. All of them suck.

Some suck because they don’t include inline images from articles in the offline version. Some suck because they’re not free, some suck because the don’t extract just the article text but make the entire webpage available offline, which doesn’t really work on my tiny screen. Others suck because they don’t sync properly.

And then there was Pocket. It includes inline images in the offline version, but it doesn’t include the rest of a webpage. If it can’t reliably detect where the article starts or ends, it makes the entire page available offline. Even on my tiny screen, it still manages to make offline webpages very readable. It’s free, and it has no limits on how many articles you can make available offline. It can also make images and videos available for offline viewing.

Pocket is by far the best option for reading offline content on your smartphone / tablet. Get it here, you won’t be disappointed.

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