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By Chris Meadows

Over on Wired’s “Gadget Lab”, Dylan F. Tweney gushes about how great an app Instapaper Pro is for your iPhone: “It’s so useful that it just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.”

I would have to agree in principle, if not necessarily in degree; Instapaper—which allows you to sync on-line news articles for reading in a reformatted off-line version, sort of like a modern version of AvantGo—has been very useful to me for as long as I’ve used the free version.

Among other things, Tweney notes, the price for Instapaper Pro has just been cut from $10 to $5. Given this price drop, plus the fact that the most recent so-called “update” to the free version of Instapaper actually decreased its functionality (really lame, guys. Since then, I was holding off on downloading it and just downloading everything else manually), I figured I might as well upgrade.

I’m glad I did. The $5 pro version of Instapaper adds a number of useful features, including its own RSS reader that means I’ll probably stop using NetNewsWire altogether. The “tilt to scroll” function is cute, albeit I’m not sure how useful in the long run, and the way it automatically downloads articles in the background while you have it open is nice too.

If you haven’t tried Instapaper yet, it’s definitely worth a look.

 
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