Offline. Synchronized.

Offline seems to be finally coming to maturity. Which is a real joy to me, as I continue spending long hours either airborne or in places with spotty or no network coverage at all (such as high mountain treks).

On one end increasing number of applications support offline mode for mobile devices, which is synchronized with the "master" cloud contents / configuration. Among them are:

• Pocket (great for offline reading and seamless synchronization with the a continuous flow of news through services like Feedly)
• Kindle (great for purchased books as well as private PDF documents)
• YouTube (with the recent introduction of the YouTube Red service that has the "save" option built in, exceptional for online courses and instructional videos)
• Lightroom (with the recently introduced offline edit feature)
• Netflix (introduced recently the "download" option)
• Gaia GPS (fantastic support for offline global topo maps)

All these apps would be probably not that meaningful if there were no devices capable of storing / caching all that offline contents. But we just have the new kid on the block that seems to understand the offline trend: the iPad with 512GB of storage. It is probably the greatest combination of mobile processing power, screen size (you have two choices: 10" and 12") and built-in storage. And it opens as a completely new offline media platform, supporting the vastly improved offline modes in the aforementioned apps.