It was inevitable and now Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later, has joined the army of free services with paid premium offerings. But while two of three features focus particularly on convenience, one in particular is probably worth the subscription fee.
Pocket is one of the Android Community team's must-have apps, but, if left unchecked, it can grow into an unwieldy, unread. forgotten, and most likely unorganized mass of links, articles and whatnot. To help make sense of it all, Pocket is now offering a premium subscription that adds features that can help you better organize, or at least dig through, your collected articles. Pocket will suggest tags, which you can apply with a single click or tap, to relieve you of having to determine and think of the most appropriate tag for a piece. Of course, it will only be able to suggest the right ones after learning from your own habits, so the more you use, the smarter it will become. Premium users will also be able to enjoy a more powerful search, which can sift through not just titles or links but also through content, tags, author, keywords, and more.
But perhaps the most interesting premium feature for the online archivist is the Permanent Library. Pocket will save a copy of the an article for posterity's sake and that copy will be kept in that original condition forever. Or as long as Pocket remains in business. This means that even if the original article changes, or disappears from the face of the Internet, your copy in your Pocket will remain safe. It's like your own personal Wayback Machine.
Truth be told, these premium features will only make sense for those that use Pocket less as a transient repository of links and more as a dumping ground and filing cabinet of anything and everything. Like an Evernote of sorts, but for articles on the web. For this type of user, a $4.99 monthly subscription might indeed be worth the price. But if you can really dig into your pocket, pun intended, you can opt for a $44.99 yearly fee instead.