Pocket

CNET Editors' review

by: Jaymar Cabebe on April 17, 2012

Pocket is the successor to the megapopular short-term bookmarking tool Read It Later. It offers much of the core functionality of Read It Later, plus it comes with a number of improved features and a completely redesigned interface.

Essentially a short-term bookmarking tool, Pocket helps you better manage your online media consumption across all of your different devices, regardless of platform. With it, you can put lengthy articles or videos away and queue them up for reading and watching later, from any of your devices. This can be incredibly convenient when, say, you come across a video on your phone, but you realize you'd rather watch it on your desktop. With Pocket, the transition is seamless.

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, you can hit Menu and share the page with Pocket. And most items will automatically be cached for offline access (videos excluded). You can choose to save either full pages or stripped-down versions, which show only words, images, captions and video links from an article. All content can be stored right on your SD card, unless you elect otherwise. When accessing your list from the Pocket app, it's also easy to sort by content type (text, video, or image), and to edit items in bulk.

Because Pocket has an open API, it has come to be conveniently integrated with a host of mobile and desktop applications. This means you can save links to your Pocket list 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 with your device's other applications just the same.

When you're finished with items on your Pocket list, you can check them off to move them to your Read Archive. It's a great safeguard in case you missed something and want to see already-viewed content again.

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.