Instapaper for Apple Watch is surprisingly not terrible

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Instapaper for the Apple Watch is here. Photo: Instapaper
Instapaper for the Apple Watch is here. Photo: Instapaper

The Apple Watch may be good at telling you how healthy you are, tracking your steps, propelling you to move, and reminding you of upcoming appoints, but conventional wisdom says it’s rubbish for reading. The 38mm and 42mm screens are just too tiny to read anything more than a sentence or two long on, and certainly not any longreads.

So on paper (no pun intended), Instapaper for Apple Watch is a terrible idea. Amazingly, though, it looks like the Instapaper team at Betaworks has made it work.

Here’s how Instapaper on Apple Watch works. Instead of making you scroll through text and try to read your stored articles on the Apple Watch, Instapaper for Apple Watch uses Siri’s text-to-speech abilities to read your stories aloud.

Once an article is selected, the Watch app provides you with a text-to-speech controller that includes options to play, pause, fast forward, rewind, change the rate, and view the article’s current progress.

Here’s where it gets clever, though. The iPhone and Apple Watch apps for Instapaper are completely synchronized, so if you decide to listen to a few minutes of an article on your Apple Watch while you’re jogging, for example, you can pick it right back up in text form from the exact position you left off in audio.

Marco Arment, the original developer behind Instapaper, is impressed by what Betaworks has done here, and frankly, I am too. Who would have thought Instapaper would still be relevant after so many years, especially on a device that, at first, seems so unsuited to it.

You can download Instapaper for iPhone and Apple Watch here.

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