A while back (well, last September when I got my iPad),  I tried out Instapaper's competitor, Read It Later.  I have to admit that what drew me to Read It Later was the entry price: free.  Instapaper did have a free version but they axed it.  For my use free was good enough.  There were a few features that I now use, that I didn't back then, that were on the Pro version, but I didn't care.  Then, a few weeks later Read It Later had a sale, and BAM - I decided to get the paid version (for $1.99 I think) - not bad for all of the additional functionality, at least considering that Instapaper was $6.99.

In any case, I enjoyed ReadItLater and now it's gone...or rather metamorphosed into Pocket! For what it's worth, I prefer the old bookmark-based icon compared to "pocket" - Then again, change isn't always easy ;-)

I think that the new interface looks much crisper both on the web version and on the iPad version (haven't messed with the iPhone version yet). The nice thing about this version is that (it appears) to be doing video for offline use as well.  A while back I was testing out another app, called Spool, that was supposed to do video well. While Spool worked well, I almost never used it because I liked ReadItLater enough to not want to have two apps for "reading later."

Pocket (aka Readitlater 2.0) is now free.  I wonder if we, the paid customers, will get a Pro version in the future.

Read it later - on iPad

Pocket - on iPad