Read It Later is a service aimed at making it easy to deal with links and articles from the Internet. As David explained in our review of the Symbian version of this application.
In the social media age, we have links coming at us left, right and centre, and there isn't enough time in a day to get them all processed and read. That's why having some sort of system to defer your reading material is an essential tool, Read It Later is one such tool. It started out as a Firefox plugin, but is now available for almost every platform. Another problem solved by Read It Later is cutting down both distractions and loading times by presenting an offline text only copy of saved pages.
Of course the idea is to defer reading until a time of your choosing... and there's a good chance that time may be when your away from your computer. So mobile access to Read It Later can be a real boon - and this is where apps like MetroPaper come in.
MetroPaper can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace; a freal trial is available with the full app costing £1.49 / $1.99 / €1.99. There is a free ad-supported version too.
There are a number of other Read It Later applications available for Windows Phone including TimeToRead, Read later, Browse it later, Read It At 7, RILed Up, and ReadLator, but we like MetroPaper for its simple and clear user interface and solid implementation of the core Read It Later features.
As well as pinning individual stories as Live Tiles, the application itself features a count of your unread items. Sharing via social networks is supported via the native sharing facility, which saves having to authenticate to various services. There are three views in the main panorama for Unread, Read, and All. While reading posts, font size can be adjusted, and the theme can be changed between light and dark, or to follow the phone's native theme. Stories can also be opened in Internet Explorer to see it in its original context.
