Have you downloaded iOS7? Do you find reading text-heavy articles on your phone or iDevice to be labor intensive, boring, and/or time consuming? Then you may want to try the new iOS7 app, Velocity. The makers of Velocity claim their app can increase your reading speed from 200 words per minute to 1000 by using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation technique. You can choose how quickly you'd like to read, but the default is 300 words per minute, which Velocity creators cite as being 50% more words than the average reader can normally take in. Another useful feature of the app calculates how long it will take you to read an article. Velocity isn't the only speed-reading tool on the market using this same technique, however.
Web-Based Apps
Back in September of 2011, I wrote about a web-based speed-reading program called Zap Reader that performs much the same function as Velocity. Zap Reader includes options to adjust the words per minute, number of words shown at a time, font, font size, alignment, and font color. Another web-based option is Spreeder, which performs more or less the same task as Zap Reader but without the option to change the font and with the addition of window height and width controls.
But that's not all...
Other Speed-Reading Apps for iOS
Two other options for iOS are Fastr and ReadQuick. Fastr is a speed-reading app similar to all of the aforementioned options, but it has additional features allowing you to highlight and annotate parts of text, save them, and share them with others via social media. In addition to being accessible on iPhones, iPads, and iPods, it can also be accessed from a desktop computer. ReadQuick is very similar but with Instapaper integration and without annotation tools.
And One for Android
FastReader is available in the Google Play store. It lets you read an article in any browser by sharing its link with FastReader. Text can be copied into the app with the Clipboard function. You can also use the File Explorer to read eBooks (including TXT, ePub files and soon PDF files).
And Even One for Windows Phone
Point Reader developers claim that their app can help people read 33% faster on average and even faster than that with practice. The app syncs with your SkyDrive library for ePub consumption. And, like Velocity, Point Reader calculates how long it will take you to read each chapter or book. The app does not currently work for RSS feeds or articles.
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