It’s been a month since the popular news reader app Read It Later was rebuilt and rebranded as Pocket. The app is also now free with the change, so if you’ve been staying away from Read It Later because of the $2.99 price tag, now’s your chance. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and I have to say, I’m impressed.
The company’s big push seems to be on mobile devices, so let’s start there. Pocket is available on Android, iOS (including both iPhone and iPad), and Kindle Fire. I can only speak from experience with Android, and it’s well put together. If you don’t have time to read an article or watch a video, save it to your Pocket with a new option in your standard sharing menu on your mobile browser. After being saved to your Pocket, the text and images from the link are downloaded to your mobile device so you won’t have to be online to view it.
Upon opening the Pocket application, you get a straightforward list of links with an icon from the article, if available. The list is filterable and searchable. You can even add tags to articles to more easily find them later. One setting that I haven’t been able to test is site subscriptions. From the settings menu, you can add login credentials for pay sites like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Ars Technica that allow the app to download full content without further attention from the user.
When viewing saved links, Pocket has a very clean display. Articles are shown in-app rather than opening a default browser window. This is where the app shines. The Pocket team has created a stripped-down article display that incorporates images and links. You have several options for article display, including a choice of serif or sans serif font, font size, and left- or full-justified text. Pocket has also included a choice of themes. You can choose either the default black text on white, or for reading in the dark, a white on black theme is easier on the eyes. They’ve also included brightness control from inside the app, which I found to be a surprisingly helpful touch.
I’m a little surprised to find myself using Pocket at my desk more than when I’m mobile. In a standard browser, Pocketed links show up in a grid by default (above is a screencap of my Pocket), with the option of a simple list if you want, and the same filtering and tagging capabilities as the mobile apps. If an article has an image, Pocket tries to show it in the queue. If not, you get a section of the first paragraph. YouTube and other videos show up with their own marker overlaying the placeholder image. As in mobile, articles open to a stripped-down page within the Pocket site with many of the same controls.
As far as saving links to Pocket from a desktop browser, it’s a little bare-bones at present. The app makers haven’t updated the extensions for Firefox or Internet Explorer yet, but they’ve created a bookmarklet (how 2005) until those are ready to go. Fortunately for me, Pocket had a Chrome extension from day one, so I’ve been able to bypass the bookmarklet stage.
I have to tell you, the Chrome extension is pretty darn awesome, and it’s probably the reason I took a closer look at Pocket in the first place. Not only did they provide the requisite address bar button and an option in the right-click menu, they integrated Google Reader and Twitter functionality. With the Pocket Chrome extension, I can send unopened links to Pocket with one click. In the case of Twitter, Pocket saves the link within a tweet instead of saving the tweet itself. Very well done, and I’m hopeful that functionality from within Facebook will be added in the near future. The only thing the extension is missing is a link to your Pocket queue, which is just bizarre. Judging from the comments on the extension page, I’m not the only one surprised by the omission, and I have a feeling it’ll be added soon.
All that said, there are a few problems that the Pocket team needs to get a handle on. In both mobile and desktop versions, Pocket doesn’t always find images to display. When it doesn’t find one, it sometimes gives you an ugly gray default image instead of returning an article description. That’s a problem for an app that prides itself on its visual display. Pocket also can’t handle images that have captions, as many major sites often do, and there’s no indication that anything’s missing unless an absent image is referenced in the text. Animated GIFs are disabled altogether, which is again an odd decision for an app designed around visual appeal. In addition, Pocket has trouble serving articles in-app. It’s awesome when it works, but there are times when it launches an article outside of the app to the article’s website. I’ve tested a few Techcitement articles and found that some open in Pocket and others launch on our website. Again, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent reason for this. At least not one that I can see.
There are times when Pocket decides to give a link prominence in the grid by giving it two blocks horizontally. At first I thought this was due to length of the article, but then it gave the feature treatment to a one-paragraph post. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this, and it would be nice if it were consistent, maybe even to user specifications. I’d also like to see some reordering functionality on Pocket. As it is, links appear in the order that they were saved (either newest to oldest or vice versa). There should be a way to keep a link at the top of the list, and I’d love to see some drag-and-drop functionality like what Delicious has done.
Pocket is the first cloud-based bookmarking tool that I’ve been able to integrate into my internet viewing experience for more than a few days, and that’s no small feat. After the Pocket team attends to these few problems and introduces Firefox, Internet Explorer, and other browser extensions, I can imagine a lot of people following suit. Give it a try by signing up for the free service, and let us know what you think.
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