App review: Spritz is an incredible way to comprehend all those huge textbooks in a matter of hours

Other than costing a large percentage of your student loan, your textbooks also tend to have the terrible flaw of having a large amount of words in them - all of which you have to read and comprehend. Not only is reading several 1,000-page textbooks going to leave you with a large headache, it also takes the valuable time out of your life in which you could be watching films or reading a book which is actually of interest to you. Fear not however, as the new Spritz app is here to save the day.

When an individual is reading, each eye movement between words on a page is called a "saccade" and within each word the eye searches for an "Optimal Recognition Point" (ORP). Once the ORP is found, the word is processed within the brain for the meaning and context before your eyes move on to the next word. According to Spritz, the most time-consuming part of reading is the aforementioned movement of the eyes and the search for the ORP, and as a consequence, the global average reading speed is a mere 220 words per minute.

The technology of the app flashes each word on the specially designed "redicle" frame at the desired speed and highlights the ORP of each word in red; this means that the eyes are not wasting time moving between the words on the page and they also do not have to search for the ORP of each word. Extensive research has also been conducted into the best font to use and a specially designed font has been created to enhance your reading speed most effectively. The studies into the Spritz technology have found that this method can be learned with as little as five minutes of training and, after some practice, the user can read up to 1,000 words per minute using this app. Although research is still ongoing, initial studies have shown good feedback from users who are dyslexic and users who suffer from ADD. The Spritz examples on their official website really show how helpful this technology could be for everyday use and I was Spritz-ing at 600 words per minute in no time at all.

Although this technology has only currently been made available to users of the Samsung S5 and the Galaxy Gear 2 smart watch, thousands of developers have been working on a range of software platforms over the past three years to develop platform-specific Spritz apps; this means that soon any device which runs Android, Javascript or IOS will be capable of supporting it. The possibilities of this technology are endless, you’ll be able to read an entire text without having to unlock your phone, read your entire Facebook newsfeed in a matter of minutes and comprehend all those huge textbooks in a matter of hours.