Meghan Neal reviews Spritz, text-streaming technology designed to double or triple your reading speed on a smartphone screen:
The idea is that traditional reading—scanning a big block of text—takes up too much space on such tiny screens, and is limited by the inefficiency of having to move your eyeball from word to word and line to line. The Spritz app rethinks this by streaming the content one word at a time and highlighting specific letters in red with a marker line above them to tell you exactly where to keep your focused fixed to avoid the precious time lost by having to move your eyeballs around. …
I tried the feature out and frankly it gave me a headache; also, if you look away for a minute you’ll miss whole sentences, so that’s problematic. But, supposedly, it works. The average adult reading level is just below 300 words per minute, and Spritz claims it can get users easily up to 500 wpm and eventually, depending on your skill, up to 1,000 wpm. I mean, who doesn’t want to be able to do that? And it’s not the same as skimming; the company also claims that comprehension actually increased in beta trials.
(Image via Spritz)
The Dish 