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Read It Later Reborn: Pocket Saves Everything “For Later”

In the past five years, reading on the web has fundamentally changed. Read It Later, the first popular service to pioneer a certain kind of “bookmarking” for web articles, is reborn today as Pocket, and it promises to change the way users think of web content to “save for later”. Most importantly, Pocket wants to address what has become the scarcest resource of web citizens: time.

Read Later

People never had time to check out all the cool stuff that happens on the Internet every day. As blogging platforms started taking off in the past decade, sometime during 2006 some people began to realize they didn’t have time to read every article that was posted online. The digital publishing revolution had already happened, but the explosion of blogging was just starting to produce high-quality, journalistic and well-informed pieces that, due to a simple scarcity of time and intuitive tools, people didn’t have time to read in their entirety. Whilst the act of “bookmarking” something on the Internet goes back to several years ago, the more focused, practical act of “saving an article for later” can actually be traced back in the form of popular consumer software to somewhere in between late 2006 and 2007.

Nate Weiner was one of the first developers (and avid web readers) to understand that the bookmarking systems in place at the time (Delicious, magnolia, or simple browser bookmarks) weren’t cutting it, from a technical and psychological perspective, for those users that just wanted to put off an article for later.

The difference between “bookmarking” and “saving for later” is both practical and conceptual: a regular bookmark is usually archived for good, as bookmarking services place great emphasis on letting users store bookmarks – links to webpages – forever in their accounts. There are some exceptions today, but the underlying philosophy has pretty much stayed the same. The action of “saving an article for later”, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatical approach: an article a user wants to read today or tomorrow isn’t necessarily representative of a webpage he wants to store and archive for eternity. The terminology itself – “for later” – indicates that something is going to happen ”later”. Once an article is read, most users tend to go on with their lives and forget about it. Like I said, it’s different today, and there are some specific use cases in which someone might want to archive articles – but the original concept lives on. People don’t have time to read every web article ever published.

Back in 2007, Nate Weiner set out to create a simple Firefox extension that would allow him to keep articles he found at work (and wanted to “read later”) in a different place than its browser bookmarks. On August 6, 2007, he launched the aptly-named Read It Later, a Firefox extension that did one thing well: it kept articles in a cozy little extension, saved for later. Users could hit a button to quickly save an article, and they could even save multiple browser tabs at once. As the extension started taking off, Nate began adding more features to Read It Later, such as offline support in December 2007.

Meanwhile, Marco Arment, developer at Tumblr, was facing a similar problem himself in 2007. He was constantly coming across news or blog articles he didn’t have time to read at the moment, and he needed something to read while on the bus or waiting in line. Arment discovered that there was no easy way to save links from a computer and access them later from the iPhone – we’re talking mid-2007 here, when the iPhone was getting in the hands of the first millions of customers, and when there was no SDK for developers to build native apps. So Arment decided, as he would later explain, to build just the service for that: Instapaper, a webpage that collected links saved from a bookmarklet, was launched publicly in January 2008. Like Read It Later, Instapaper solved a twofold issue: it allowed users to quickly save articles, and retrieve them later. Unlike Weiner’s app, though, Instapaper saved links in a webpage that could be easily accessed from the iPhone – mobile reading, in fact, seemed to be one of Instapaper’s primary features from the get-go. As Arment’s service became popular, he also went back to the drawing board – or in his case, programming tools – to implement new functionalities for Instapaper. The service’s hallmark feature, a text mode that strips unnecessary content out of web articles, was released in April 2008.

The rest is history. As Apple kept improving its mobile ecosystem with new devices, OS upgrades, and the App Store, Read It Later and Instapaper evolved, and iteratively became two fantastic services that serve millions of users every month. Over the years, we have followed both Instapaper and Read It Later closely at MacStories. Read more

Gemini Lovingly Finds Duplicates Of Your Files

Spring-cleaning is not much fun to do. Especially when talking about cluttered hard drives like mine. We all know with big hard drives comes big responsibility, but let’s be honest, just a few of us are constantly paying heed to delete useless duplicates. This problem can’t be tackled with apps which just provide good functionality — the task of decluttering your computer is that boring, you need great pixels as well to keep up the user’s interest and motivation.

Gemini is the first app I ever saw solving this necessary combination of design and usefulness with ease and bravour. The guys at MacPaw did a great job with it. When firing it up, Gemini is just a input screen on which you can simply drop folders or whole drives to let the app analyze and scan them. Unfortunately, this process takes some time but at least it’s subtitled with entertaining words (e.g.; “I, Gemini, am actually a duplicated file magician”). Afterwards the found duplicates are presented in a Finder-like, slightly modified window. Besides a list with the file names and paths it contains a pie chart showing up the media types of the useless files. The app comes with Quick Look support as well. Browsing your files is very intuitive, and I literally laughed when I saw the animation after finally deleting all my futile used data - it rushes through a virtual paper shredder falling down as shred.

The rest of Gemini’s look has got the same intuitive, almost magical touch to it. The rounded edges, warm colours and simple UI structure immediately appealed to me. It’s modern, minimalist, functional and — most important — it works. The design concept ends exactly where functionality begins, something I like very much. I could not find any unpolished detail in it, maybe the path information shown with the Quick Look preview is implemented a bit improperly, but I am sure that if there’s something you can not polish in order to make it beautiful, then it’s path information, as I think you’ll agree.

Apart from that, Gemini is a pretty good example of how good design can be both intuitive and functional. It really simplifies the process of cleaning up your computer, making it accessible for everyone from laymen to expert. And besides that, the price of $7.99 is more than just inexpensive when it comes to free hard drive space, it’s an excellent value for the money, so purchasing Gemini should be a no-brainer.

The iPad As A GPS Speedometer with Speed

Developed by High Caffeine Content, Speed is one of those apps that wouldn’t have been possible – or at least, nearly as enjoyable – ten years ago. Built for simplicity, elegance, and extreme practicality, Speed is a GPS speedometer that uses the iPad’s location data to tell you how fast you’re traveling. It works with iPads that have GPS available, and it has been designed to take full advantage of the Retina display. With a combination of Google Maps and beautifully represented compass, speedometer, and tripmeter laid out against a lusty black leather texture, Speed won’t replace all the functions of your car’s dashboard, but it also offers a glimpse into the future of car interfaces.

I have always believed that, in the future, car manufacturers and designers would opt for more driver-friendly touch interfaces and displays. Whilst not fully there yet, Speed is a great example of what the basics of this concept may look like a few years from now. A large display, a good-looking interface and menus, touch controls, built-in GPS and data polled directly from Google Maps. More importantly, all packaged into a consumer product that also happens to run an app that looks like a minimal car dashboard. Several car makers have already experimented with modular setups to allow for iOS devices to become a central part of the automobile experience; Speed shows that, with modern technologies, even third-party developers can produce something functional and pleasant.

I actually gave Speed a try in my Polo, driving around Viterbo and up to San Martino al Cimino. Once I switched from mph to kmh (just touch the speedometer), the app started updating my location on the map as I was driving, and it started tracking my speed and trip length. The app is surprisingly fast at detecting changes in speed: I have noticed it takes less than 2 seconds to detect sudden braking or stop. The developers say Speed offers a “a near-accurate representation”, and I can attest that’s absolutely the case here. Even better, because of this slight delay, if you’re keeping a constant speed it’ll seem as if the app really knows how fast you’re driving. The technology and implementation are quite impressive.

Some may deem Speed as a nice demo, but useless. While that’s certainly the case if you’re only looking for a full-time replacement for your car’s dashboard – and honestly, how can you expect an iPad to be 100% ready for that yet? – I think the app is worth checking out for its elegance and solid feature set alone. There are even some settings to adjust to magnetic north, use analog/digital speedometers, and use a speed limiter. On a more practical level, these features and settings make for, say, a pretty sweet solution to monitor trip lengths or check just how fast the local bus driver is traveling. It’d be nice to see the app gaining richer data representations (average speed, mileage history, speed patterns) in a future update.

The opportunity for Post-PC devices to improve existing technologies and appliances is huge. Speed is one of the many examples, and a very well-built one. Get the app here, and check out a video below. Read more

Scanner Pro Combines “Post-PC” and “Paperless” In A Single App

Scanner Pro, a camera-based scanning application for iOS devices by Readdle, has been updated to version 4.0, which adds a number of engine optimizations and new features, as well as support for the iPad. I was able to test the latest update to Scanner Pro, and I’m thoroughly impressed by the degree of independence and reliability Readdle achieved with Scanner Pro 4.0.

Let me explain. Until today, I have exclusively relied on a large, heavy wireless printer/scanner or my portable Doxie Go to scan, manage, and organize documents. In order to achieve a seamless paperless setup that required zero, or at least very minimal effort to be maintained and consistently used, I thought that the Doxie Go would be the solution for all my needs, as it offers a portable and lightweight device that outputs images at great quality in PDF. More often than not, however, the new devices and apps we have available nowadays bring new questions for issues we thought we had already figured out; as I began using the iPad as my primary computer, I realized how the Doxie, albeit well-designed and extremely usable, would still require me to use a computer to import scans, organize them, delete the ones I didn’t like, and upload the rest to Evernote.

I asked myself whether the iPad could even become a scanner. After all, the new iPad got a solid camera update in its latest version, and whilst not on par with the iPhone 4S’ camera, an iPhone 4-like lens – I assumed – could probably be a decent alternative to physical scanners, even the portable ones. The difference was mainly in the software: I wasn’t looking for an iPad accessory to turn the device into a scanner, I was scouting around for great scanner apps that would a) work reliably on the new iPad and Retina display, and b) support various online services, have basic document management features, and an “Open In” menu. Fortunately, Scanner Pro 4.0 by Readdle fits all these requisites, and it does so in a way that allows me to say this is the scanner app to try if you own a new iPad, and plan on going paperless using it. Read more

Everyme Review

Oliver Cameron thinks there’s something special, intriguing, about the address book. As a personal list that smartphone users have curated over several years, one could wonder about the stories, the people, and the interactions that are part of the creation and curation of an address book. But what can software developers do to leverage the data of our address books to redefine the way we get in touch with our closest friends?

Over the years, digital address books have exponentially increased the amount of data associated with names and phone numbers. First came dedicated fields for email addresses and contact pictures; then, when smartphones gained decent networking and data connections, the address book turned into a richer solution to store people’s information, rather than just addresses, and keep it always accessible on multiple devices through the cloud. Either through Gmail, Exchange, iCloud, or something else, it’s very likely that your address book contains names and phone numbers, but also email addresses, Twitter and Facebook usernames, location data, birthdays, family relationships, and various notes. The address book is, in fact, a people database that’s exclusive to each person. There is no address book like each other.

While the composition of an address book differs from user to user, some interactions and relationships are reflected on multiple instances of the address book, and the cloud can sometimes access a portion of these interactions to create lists of people “you may already know”. If I have you in my address book as a “friend”, maybe I also have your email address, and perhaps you have my information on your address book as well. With the right privacy settings, services like Facebook, Twitter, and just about any app with a social component these days allow us to look up friends that are already signed up by simply matching email addresses. This is a way to leverage the information stored in our address books to facilitate the sign up process for new services. They make it easier for us, using the address book we have been curating over the years.

Sometimes, however, people don’t want social apps that force them to share with everyone. Services like Twitter and Google+ are the polar opposites when it comes to determining how users engage with each other: whereas Twitter’s model of following/unfollowing may result overly simplistic to some people, Google’s insistence on Circles has found users confused by the plethora of options Google+ comes with. And then there’s Facebook, which has been experimenting for years with the concept of private groups, albeit they never really took off, and so Facebook preferred implementing deeper privacy settings, rather than forcing people to manage groups and names and lists. But is there a sweet spot between Twitter’s simplicity, Google’s circle management, and Facebook’s wide adoption both on desktop and mobile? Something that can leverage the data from our address books and social networks we’re already using to build a new platform to bring us closer to the people we know “in real life”? That’s what Oliver Cameron and his team are trying to build with Everyme. Read more

Marked 1.4: A Little Something for Everybody

What started out as a companion app aimed at tech bloggers writing articles in Markdown has become a multipurpose Swiss Army knife for previewing scripts, stories, and code for writers and programmers. While Marked has always fulfilled my needs for finalizing drafts, copying HTML output into a web editor, and checking to see if I’ve overused various positive adjectives, the latest version adds an abundance of new features that make previewing articles in realtime even more useful. It’s important to note that Marked 1.4 is compatible with Lion only — Snow Leopard and Leopard users won’t be able to take advantage of the latest features.

What’s useful to bloggers:

Three changes have a direct effect on my workflow: Scroll to first edit, which moves the document to the current edit point when changes are detected; HTML highlighting, which makes scanning HTML output easier than before; and popovers on external links, which will bring up options to copy and validate a link. The first two new features work splendidly, with Marked scrolling to the paragraph where I’ve added a link or changed a sentence once I’ve left the focus of TextEdit (my editor of choice) or save manually with ⌘S.

Unfortunately, link popovers don’t work as expected. Instead of hovering the mouse over a link, clicking on the link brings up a popover with the copy, validate, and open-in-Safari options. Link validation in particular is great as it provides a quick way to check a slew of links without having to leave the Marked preview (especially useful if you use [this]: style of link in Markdown). Once the link has been clicked on for the popover, clicking it a second time takes you to the website in your default browser. It seems whether the popover is shown depends on whether the URL has already been checked (document-wide).

A fourth new feature bloggers will love if they’ve written their own Marked styles to match the format of their websites will be per-document styles. Instead of changing the style through the GUI, you can include a brief piece of metadata at the beginning of your document by adding the following: “Marked Style: Your preferred style here” (without quotes). If you create new documents with shortcuts or triggers, you can further automate how it will look in Marked by adding a snippet of metadata — useful when you publish or want to see output for a specific blog. The metadata you add is excluded from the HTML output. HTML output, by the way, has a new toggle in the titlebar.

Lastly, for bloggers concerned about their HTML output, Marked now gives you the option to disable header ID creation. Unless you have a specific need for styling, there’s no reason to have Marked generate an ID per header. I’ve definitely enabled this one.

What’s useful to writers and screenwriters:

Scrivener 2.x projects and Leanpub files are now supported by Marked. Scrivener projects, like .md or .txt files, can simply be dragged into Marked and compiled to provide a live preview of your working content. Pressing ⌘E (open in editor) will take open .scriv files being previewed in Scrivener if you’re reviewing your script and need to make a live change. As you write and save your document, Marked will reflect the changes made.

Leanpub compatibility is a little bit harder to explain. What Marked will allow writers to do with their Leanpub files is merge and compile them so that the documents can be previewed and navigated via a table of contents. To take advantage of this feature, an Index.md file is created and requires that the first line be “frontmatter:” (again without quotes) signifying the Leanpub format. In the Index.md file, you’ll need to add your Leanpub files as sections using a special syntax that’s separated by Markdown headers to designate the book title, chapters, etc. This help page should give you a better handle on how to use Leanpub and multi-file documents with Marked.

Having commented on using table of contents, it’d be wrong of me not to mention its fantastic new search feature. After pressing ⌘T to show the table of contents (which basically groups all of the headers in a Markdown document into a list), you can tap the space bar to quickly type a chapter number or section title. Using the arrow or J/K keys, you can select the section before pressing escape to continue previewing your document. It’s a quick and keyboard friendly way to jump around an expansive document.

What’s useful to programmers:

Programmers get their own automatic syntax highlighting update for code blocks. I found that while it worked well with Marked’s default preview, syntax highlighting often had undesirable results when high contrast was enabled. Highlighting itself is taken care of thanks to highlight.js.

Programmers will also appreciate the ability to create fenced code blocks, which are delimited by tildes or backticks. Languages can be specified, but highlight.js will try to automatically detect one of its 41 supported languages on its own.

For those creating GitHub readmes, the GitHub style has been updated to reflect the most recent changes on the site. In the preferences, a new option has also been added to preserve line breaks in paragraphs, mimicking GitHub’s style if you choose to enable it.

Other changes:

Two new themes have been added to Marked: Amblin and Upstanding Citizen. Amblin, laid-back and traditional, is a polar opposite of Upstanding Citizen’s bold centered headers and condensed paragraphs. Amblin is great for writing cozily late into the night — it’s ousted Swiss for me as far as the default styles go.

The preferences panes are all brand new — options are easy to find and are nicely separated into convenient sections. If you plan on printing documents, you can force page breaks with a break snippet, by using horizontal rulers, or before H1 and H2 headers (this printing section should give you a quick primer on the options you have available).

No longer catering to just mainstream tech reporters, Marked has expanded its role from a nerdy Markdown utility to a polished, multipurpose tool that’s bent on making sure any craftsman of words can output a good looking document. More than just a preview app, Marked is feature rich without being complex, presenting files as you want them while providing numerous ways to do simple things from copying text to getting HTML output of your files. Support for Leanpub and Scrivener only adds usefulness for authors using Macs to produce upcoming books, and screenwriters can look forward to added compatibility with Fountain in the future.

Marked provides a lot in an accessible package, and for only $3.99 it’s a steal for anyone who works with Markdown files and its derivatives. You can check out Marked online and download it from the Mac App Store.

“Bartending” by Stephen Hackett Shows The Human Side of Apple Retail

In the past months, I’ve read a lot of books about Apple, and in particular about Steve Jobs. Bartending by Stephen Hackett, however, is the only one that struck me as being completely honest and real in the subject it covers: Apple’s retail stores as a genuine, living collection of stories and people. Not just a business.

Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius, is short, direct, and entertaining. You can probably finish it in 40 minutes if you’re in the mood of reading about Apple’s retail employees and the stories of customers who happen to swing by the Genius Bar every day. And if you like a style that’s fun, cuts to the point, and isn’t ashamed of recollecting the real thoughts of an Apple Genius who sees all kinds of customers on a daily basis, I bet you will devour Bartending from cover to cover in less than an hour. It is a pleasure to read Stephen narrate how he helped a woman recover the precious photos of her children after her hard drive failed, or how the iPhone represented a major shift both in terms of audience, and at the Bar.

I like to think of Bartending as more than “a book about the Genius Bar”. Whether or not you are aware of how Apple’s retail behemoth works behind the scenes, Bartending provides a fun and enlightening look at the interactions that occur every day on both sides of the business. In front of and behind the Genius Bar. I think Stephen’s greatest accomplishment with this book is that he explains with a human, friendly tone that, in spite of the gadgets and dollars involved with the business, the people ultimately define the stories we remember. And if the rules can be bent a little for the good of the customer – to “surprise and delight” – even better. That’s what makes this book a story of its own that fits in the Apple Community so well.

Bartending is a must-read. Get it today at $8.99 on Amazon (iBooks-friendly ePub version also available here).

Drafts Review

In the past months, there’s been a surge of “launcher apps” – lightweight utilities that allow iOS users to perform common tasks such as calling someone or starting a FaceTime call without having to use Apple’s apps, and thus their entire interfaces. However, while the concept of launchers and shortcuts has been around for years in the App Store – especially on the quick dial side, apps like Favorites first explored the idea of turning contacts into shortcuts – several of the utilities we have recently reviewed have leveraged the simplicity of such concept to build more powerful solutions to help users save time. With a combination of clever interface designs, new APIs and URL handlers, apps like Launch Center, Buzz, and World Contacts+ are redefining the way users think of interoperability and customization on the iOS platform. App Cubby’s Launch Center has especially gained a well deserved spot in many’s iOS dock thanks to its extensive support for third-party apps and a polished UI.

For the past week, I have been able to use Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, a new iPhone app that’s like “Launch Center for text” – a utility that allows you to save short snippets of text – the drafts – and act on them by sharing them through a number of services or system actions.

Drafts is very simple. Surprisingly so, if you expected to find options to enter custom URL handlers for apps that are capable of accepting text inputs. In fact, my mention of Launch Center is only theoretical, as both utilities share the same underlying ideology – to aggregate a set of actions and supported apps for a specific input into a single interface – but the first version of Drafts doesn’t come with the same amount of customization and tweaks you can find in Launch Center. Still, when it comes to text, Drafts has proved to be an invaluable addition to my workflow that, like Launch Center, got its spot in my iPhone dock.

Drafts saves snippets of text. The app displays a word & character count for these snippets, which can be saved locally and accessed at any time by hitting the drafts icon in the app’s toolbar. Because Drafts 1.0 is iPhone-only, iCloud support hasn’t been added yet – your snippets won’t be synced across devices. You can search for any word across your drafts, and add new ones by simply pressing a + button. In the Settings, you can set the app’s Appearance, choosing between 13 fonts (American Typewriter, Baskerville, Cochin, Courier, Georgia, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Hoefler Text, Marker Felt, Palatino, Times New Roman, Thonbury, and Verdana), three font sizes, and four themes. I chose Grayscale.

You can use Drafts as a notepad, a scratchpad of sorts, or a draft manager for your tweets, much like the defunct Birdhouse used to. Drafts sports a nice integration with Twitter, enabling you tweet natively using iOS’ support for Twitter, and letting you directly forward text to Tweetbot or the official Twitter app. If you choose to send text to these apps, the compose screen will open with the text already pasted, and you will just have to hit Send to publish a new tweet. I suspect support for more Twitter apps is coming in a future update.

Drafts isn’t just about Twitter, though. You can pick a draft, and email it to someone using the native iOS mail framework. You can copy a draft to the system clipboard, or, if you like to write in Markdown, preview the formatting, copy the Markdown to your clipboard, or email it. Being a huge fan of Markdown (which I use on a daily basis for my writing on MacStories), this is a nice addition.

Drafts is neither a text editor nor a minimal Twitter client. Drafts is a frictionless way to capture and save ideas that also happens to be integrated with system functions and applications you may be already using to elaborate on those ideas. Drafts can be used as an inspirational notepad to store the genius idea you have while you’re brewing coffee, or when you’re busy writing something else (just fire up Drafts, and quickly dictate your text if you have an iPhone 4S). I would like to see an even faster way to email text (like Captio or Note 2 Self do) as well as support for Evernote and more text-based iOS apps in a future update, so here’s to hoping the feedback on this initial version will be strong enough to encourage Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts and Terminology (which the app also supports for definitions), to consider more functionalities and an iPad counterpart. In this first version, Drafts supports TextExpander touch, but there is no option to forward text to Apple’s Messages app.

Drafts 1.0 is a very good start, especially if you’ve been looking for a standalone draft manager for Twitter. You can get the app at $0.99 on the App Store.

Gum Max Review

With a 2.1A output and 10,400mAh capacity, the Gum Max is an external backup battery by Just Mobile that works with iOS devices. Anyone who has used iOS devices extensively – perhaps some of you even use the iPad as their primary computer – knows that, for as much as Apple has focused on making iOS devices extremely user-friendly from a battery life standpoint, the battery is going to run out eventually. And if you use a lot of high-speed 3G data, watch some videos, and play a game or two, that battery indicator up in the iOS status bar is going to run out faster.

Just a few days prior to receiving my Gum Max review unit, I waited in line at the Apple Store in Rome to buy the new iPad. There, I had the chance to experience how important it is to be able to rely on iOS devices without a source of power constantly available – sure, Apple employees allowed us to use the store’s MacBooks to charge our iPhones, but it just seemed rude to me to go there every few hours just to grab a USB port without doing anything else. Waiting in line for more than 20 hours, using a lot of 3G and taking several photos of videos with my iPhone 4S, I had to recharge my device multiple times – and when I didn’t want to use the USB ports kindly provided by Apple’s employees, I had to use my friends’ portable battery packs. There, I realized I really needed to get a backup battery for iOS devices for the future. Indeed, power and battery life seem to be two common concerns these days.

The Gum Max is not one of those battery packs that you can use as a case for the iPhone. The Gum Max actually looks (and weighs) like an external drive, only it can charge iOS devices through USB. The device has a green LED indicator to show how much juice it’s got left to power your iPhone or iPad, and input and output (to recharge the Gum Max, and recharge your iOS devices) are separate, but they both use USB (regular and micro) through cables that are provided in the box. As with many Just Mobile products, the Gum Max looks like something Apple would produce, with a clean and elegant design highlighted by a sturdy aluminum shell. I like the design of the Gum Max, but how it works is what matters in critical situations.

I ran a series of tests to see how the Gum Max would recharge my iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and new iPad. Overall, the Gum Max can easily recharge an iPhone 4S from 0% to 100% in two hours, get an iPad 2 from 0% to 90% with a single charge, and recharge half of the new iPad’s bigger battery with a single charge.

Gum Max Tests

iPhone 4S, started at 3:47 AM. From 0% to 37% in 30 minutes; up to 79% after 67 minutes.

iPhone 4S, started at 11:15 PM. From 0% to 68% in 60 minutes; up to 98% in 115 minutes.

iPad 3, started at 1:10 AM. Up to 28% in 100 minutes.

iPad 3, started at 2:09 PM. Device turned on at 2:17 PM. Up to 35% in 122 minutes; 42% in 145 minutes; 51% in 176 minutes; Gum Max turned off at 5:05 PM with device at 52%.

iPad 2, started at 10:14 PM. Device turned on at 10:23 PM, reached 44% at 11:44 PM, Gum Max turned off with iPad at 90%.

At $109, you have to consider whether getting 5 hours of a new iPad back will be worth the expense, assuming you’re getting the 10 hours of battery life promised by Apple, which I have indeed noticed with my iPad (it is a 4G model, and I don’t keep brightness at 100%). Is a full iPhone charge or an iPad going back to 50% going to a considerable improvement for your work, or the way you rely on iOS devices on the go? And is that improvement going to be worth $109 over time? Especially for iPhone users, I think having a full charge back in two hours can be critical in some scenarios (last year, I spent a night at the hospital to help a friend, my phone died at 3 AM, and I couldn’t reach my parents). For third-generation iPad users, the utility of a battery pack like this is more debatable, as the new iPad is slower at charging, and it’ll completely drain the Gum Max while remaining at only 50%. For previous iPad owners, 90% of charge from zero sounds like a good investment in my opinion.

With these differences in mind, the Gum Max is a fine accessory, it’s very portable, and it comes with an elegant black carrying pouch. You can get it here.