Instapaper Enhancements Just in Time for the Release of the iPad
Posted 03/15/2010 at 3:35pm
| by Brian Proffit

Instapaper Pro has long been a great way to load your iPhone with content that you can browse at leisure--even if you don't have a wireless connection. Now they've enhanced it in version 2.2 with pagination, dictionary (Wiktionary) lookup, an in-app browser, and email support.
Instapaper lets you download web pages into your iPhone so they can be viewed offline later. A simple add-on to Safari and Firefox adds a "Read Later" bookmark to select sites for Instapaper. It does a good job of extracting the text so you don't have to worry about trying to pinch-zoom or accidentally side scrolling. You can easily change the font size for easy reading. In the past, you had to either set the pages to scroll continuously or use the "tilt-scroll" feature. Tilt scroll is admittedly sexy, scrolling the page slowly as you tilt the phone. But like most eye-candy the fascination wears off quickly. The new pagination feature works like most e-readers; just touch the bottom or top of the screen to turn pages.
Reading the latest article from Wired and stumped by one of the new buzzwords? Now you can just tap a word to highlight it and click to look it up; the word's entry in Wiktionary pops up. For those without iPhones, Instapaper also added the ability to send the page to your email rather than your phone.
The real value of Instapaper is for those getting iPads with WiFi support only. Now, you can load your article in the iPad and read it on the large screen without needing 3G support.