Get Instapaper on Your Apple Watch With New Premium Features For Free

Instapaper has long been the darling of tech bloggers, as evidenced by the plethora of articles about it on our sister site AppAdvice. In case you’re not familiar with it, Instapaper is an easy way to save articles for later reading. Essentially, Instapaper allows you to effortlessly create a customized instant newspaper. It’s a good solid app, and I’ve used it myself on and off over the years. There are other options out there, however, so I haven’t used it exclusively or consistently.

Today’s news that Instapaper is now giving out its premium features for free got me to download it again. According to my colleague Rob LeFebvre,

The premium features of Instapaper, recently acquired by Pinterest, are now free for all users. Previously priced at $2.99 per month (or $29.99 per year), these include an ad-free Instapaper website, full-text search for all articles, unlimited notes, text-to-speech playlists, unlimited speed reading, “Send to Kindle” via bookmarklet and mobile apps, and Kindle Digests of up to 50 articles each.

You can read the full article on AppAdvice here.

So why am I mentioning it here on WatchAware? Instapaper includes a handy Apple Watch app.

There is no complication, but you can place the app in your Dock for quicker access. Open the app and you get a menu: Home, Liked, and Archive. Each of these is just what you’d expect. The unexpected part, however, is what happens when you tap one of your articles. Rather than presenting the text for you to read, the app reads the articles aloud. The sound comes through your iPhone rather than your Apple Watch. In a way, it’s almost like your articles are turned into podcasts. It’s an interesting way to do this app. I’d still prefer to have the option to read or listen to my articles, but of course I can always go to my iOS device to read the articles on a larger, more comfortable screen anyway. This is principally an iOS app, with the Apple Watch app being a nice little add-on rather than the primary purpose.

Instapaper is a must-download on the App Store; it’s free and more feature-rich than ever.