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Formerly known as Read It Later, Pocket is a short-term bookmarking app that syncs across all of your devices. With it, you can put lengthy articles or videos away and queue them up for reading and watching later, no matter where you are. I tend to use the app on my commutes and whenever I come across a video on my phone, then realize I'd rather watch it on my desktop. With Pocket, the transition between different devices is seamless, which is why it's one of my favorite productivity apps on the market.
Once you've signed up for a required Pocket account, saving items to your list is simple. Whether you're reading an article in a browser or watching a video in the YouTube app, just hit Menu and use Android's share function to save the page to Pocket. Once items are saved, you can access them at any time from your Pocket list. They are even automatically cached for offline access (videos excluded). From the Settings menu, you can choose to cache either full Web pages or stripped-down versions, which show only words, images, captions, and video links from an article. I prefer letting Pocket choose which version to save, based on the type of content. And since the local memory on my device is pretty thin, I set Pocket to store all of its contents directly to my SD card. It's these types of thoughtful options that make Pocket such an incredibly convenient app to have.
In its latest update, Pocket added support for Android's text-to-speech function. This means you can actually have the app read your bookmarked content to you aloud. While the robotic speech pattern is certainly strange, the capability is impressive. For now, the Listen feature is probably not something you'll fire up very often, but as Google improves its TTS engine, I'm sure it will find wider usage.
When accessing your Pocket list, it's easy to sort by content type (text, video, or image) and to edit items in bulk. Also, the search bar makes it easy to find items by tag, title, or even URL. So, even with hundreds of items saved to your Pocket, it's fairly easy to go back and find anything you're looking for. Plus, after you check items off, they are automatically moved to an archive, where you can re-access them later. One thing you can't do with Pocket, though, is reorder the items in your list. This isn't a huge deal since the search function works so well, but it would've been a nice function to have.
Lastly, what I love about Pocket is its open API, which has made it possible for a host of other mobile and desktop applications to integrate its services. This means you can save links to Pocket directly from your favorite Twitter client, YouTube, Yelp, Google Reader, and so on. And the list of partners is growing. You can also share any item from Pocket to your device's other applications just the same. This level of compatibility, along with the app's design and impressive features, make Pocket the clear choice over competitors, such as Instapaper. (Check out my post where I compare the two.)
Overall, I can't recommend Pocket highly enough. Because it's so convenient to pull up on any device and it seamlessly integrates with so many different applications, I find myself using it on a daily basis. Plus, its snazzy design and extra details like caching for offline access, saving to SD card, and TTS support make it a tough app to beat.
