Pocket – An easy way to save a web page from your laptop to your phone for offline viewing

Imagine you were reading an article on your laptop at an Internet cafe or maybe at work. It's going well but then you check the time and discover that either your Internet session is about to run out or you've got another appointment you need to attend to. This is a common reality for many people who are constantly moving from one place to another. Sometimes this means that we lose the Internet connection that we had in one location.

A serious problem

So what do you do when you leave the place that had Internet but still want to continue reading what you had opened on your browser? I like many others would just put our computers to sleep or hibernate mode without closing the browser window. This works sure. However, it is definitely not the best solution as if you have to continue reading, you have to power on your laptop and sometimes you might be in public transport and can't just do that easily.

Besides the fact that some situations are not always ideal for reading on a laptop, the laptop could just start acting up and you end up having to reboot it and lose all those windows in the browser that you had opened. Even-though most modern browsers now allow users to save web pages as pdf, this takes multiple steps if you want that same document to be in your phone so that you can read it while on the go.

Is there a solution?

Well, fortunately for most of us who have this problem, someone has made just the solution for us. The solution is an application called Pocket that is available for both Android and iOS. The mobile application itself won't do much as it needs the browser version in the form of an extension to be installed on the browser you use most.

The extension is available on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari so you don't have to worry about leaving your favorite browser as it is available on most except Microsoft Edge but who still uses that anyways. When you got both pieces of the puzzle installed, you'll be able to save web pages that you visit on your laptop directly to your smartphone.

How it works…

When you're on the laptop and on a page but discover that you can't either finish reading it now or you'd like to read it later, simply click the extension icon on your browser and the page will be saved onto your phone. Now for this to work, both your laptop and phone need to be connected to the Internet.

This is because the page is sent to their servers and then sent to your phone. Once it reaches your phone, it will be downloaded onto the device. Within the mobile application, you can set how the web pages will be saved either in web view format which would resemble closely to the actual view you'd see if you were on the site. Or in article view which removes all the images, menu stuff and other items normally found on a typical website but leaving the actual text that makes the article.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows

I've used this application myself personally and have come across some problems. One of them being that the app is not always able to download the web pages to the phone. Apparently some sites have structures that it cannot determine or something so you could end up with weird stuff instead of the article you were looking forward to reading.

This isn't entirely the fault of the app, however, I would have appreciated if it had told me that it just couldn't get the web page instead of giving me junk. Other than that hiccup which I encountered, it's proven to be a really useful app that saves time as you don't have to do multiple steps and allows me to read articles even when I am offline.

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