Hasta La Gadget!

One thing the otherwise excellent Kindle is not is a great web-browser. Even with a hardware keyboard to type urls, the process of visiting even one site is painful. If you’re like most people, you’ll try once or twice and then give up, forever.

Which is a shame, as the little e-reader has a free, life-long 3G connection, perfect for quickly checking your mail or the news. Which is where Kinstant comes in. Kinstant is a customizable home-page (remember those?) which has just been updated with some fancy new features.

Save Kinstant as your home-page and you have one-click access to Kindle-friendly versions of many sites (Gmail, the New York Times, CNN) plus links to category pages. Click one of these and you’ll see a further list of sites, plus headlines and summaries for that subject.

With the new version, you can also add in your own links, either direct from the Kindle or from a proper web-browser somewhere else. You just add the regular URL and then, when you click the link, you are taken to a vastly simplified version formatted for the e-reader.

And there’s more. A menu gives access to a calculator and Google Maps. Yes, maps. Add your location and destination and you get directions and an embedded map with the route marked.

Users of older Kindle’s with even crappier browsers (Kindle 2 and DX) can access a trimmed down version. It’s not pretty, but it works.

Kinstant is free, and available now. To get it, just follow the link, and be amazed that you have just turned your Kindle into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Kindle-less can view the page in their computer or cellphone’s browser too, if you want to see how it looks.

Kinstant [Kinstant. Thanks, Sherwood!]

See Also:

• Photos: Putting Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 Head-to-Head
• Play Vintage Text Adventure Games on Your E-Reader
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• Simple Tip Turns Kindle into Ultimate News Reader

Newly-approved Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is a Kindle user, while longtime conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wields an iPad.

This nugget of information appeared in a recent video clip on C-SPAN. Both justices use the devices (plus hard copy printouts) to read the vast quantities of written material they must wade through — up to 40 or 50 briefs for each case, Kagan says in the video above.

The news, however, made us wonder about something of far more pressing national importance: Is this a deep ideological divide on the Supreme Court?

Would Scalia see things differently if he read opinions on the monochrome Kindle? Does Kagan need a dose of iPad color, and maybe a round or two of Flight Control HD between court sessions?

Are Kindle-wielding Justices writing angry “Mactard” and “fanboi” comments on the opinions of their opponents, while the Mac-loving faction refuses to talk or even think about anything that wasn’t designed in Cupertino?

Nah, that doesn’t seem realistic.

Thanks, Jeremy!

Djay, by Algoriddim, puts a pair of turntables and a mixer onto the touchscreen of the iPad. I have been playing with it for a day and it’s pretty awesome.

The iPad seems to be an obvious place for the app, which also exists on the Mac. Multitouch makes adjusting sliders, choosing music and — of course — scratching seem like you’re using a real (if very small) DJ setup, and an iPad full of MP3s is a lot more portable than a box of records, or even CDs.

I’m no DJ — when I used to have a bar I banned myself from touching the music as I tended to empty the place with just one song — but Djay is dead easy to use. Pick a track for each deck, in either a popover or fullscreen box, and hit Play.

You can adjust tempo up and down, cross-fade between tracks and even pick up the needle and move it to skip forward or back. The physics are faithful to the real thing: kill the power on a turntable and it doesn’t just stop dead. Instead, you hear the sound quickly slow to a halt.

And then the fancy, computer-only gimmicks begin. Tap Sync to auto-sync the tracks’ speeds (BPM), and tap the arrow next to the cross-fader to auto-mix between them. You can pick the type of transition — backspin, brake, reverse and others — and you’ll sound like a pro. Which brings us on to scratching.

Scratching properly is hard. It’s equally hard to do well in Djay. If you put a finger on the record and wiggle it, you’ll get that scratchy sound, but it sounds terrible. Switch to two fingers, though, and scratching gets smart, and Djay “automatically applies the rhythmic pattern of the currently playing song to your scratches in real time.” What that means is that you come on all DMC, again sounding like the pro you’re not.

There’s a whole lot more: When you open a track, for instance, the app analyzes it, shows you a waveform and works out the BPM. When you scratch (or just cue up a spot in the track), the waveform zooms in to help you get to the right spot. You can also set a cue-point and hit a button to skip back to it. You can even put a virtual piece of tape on the record to keep track of where you are.

Finally, it plays nice with iOS 4, with background audio (and auto-mixing!) and AirPlay support (this suffers from the usual two-second delay, making it impossible to use for actual mixing, although Bluetooth speakers fare better), and access to your full music library and playlists.

It’s a lot of fun, and kept me up to 2 a.m. this morning. Like I said, I’m a hopeless selector, but real DJs should get a whole lot from the app, especially as you can split the output and send one signal to the speakers and another to a pair of headphones. This is done with a stereo-to-mono adapter in the jack-socket, giving two mono outputs. I tried putting a USB sound-adapter (via the camera connection kit) into the dock-connector and it works, but kills the headphone output. It seems the iPad will only use one at a time.

Djay costs $20. Combine this with something like the block-rocking, battery-powered SuperTooth speaker and you have yourself a pretty sweet portable party.

Djay for iPad [Algoriddim]

See Also:

• Portable DJ Gadget Improves UI with Second Version
• Pacemaker DJ System: A Party in Your Pocket
• Farewell, SL-1200: Panasonic Scratches Iconic Technics Turntable …
• iPhone Turntable App Will Land You in the Nuthouse
• Ears-On With the SuperTooth Disco Bluetooth Boombox

With the next-generation iPad rumored for a spring 2011 release, Asian websites are posting images of purported third-party cases for the device.

The cases, spotted by Apple fan blogs MacRumors, Powerbook Medic and iLounge, sport common characteristics: a hole for a rear-facing camera and a rectangular hole that could be for an SD-card slot.

The premature-accessory game is a crapshoot. Occasionally accessory makers have sources connected to Apple in the plastics industry, who leak characteristics of new Apple hardware so they can get a head start on making cases. There have been times when leaked case designs accurately foreshadow new hardware features, but also times when they were wrong.

If the iPad cases above are based on real characteristics of the iPad, they reveal some interesting tidbits. Many have speculated the iPad 2 would gain a front-facing camera, but a rear-facing camera, as the cases suggest, was less expected. Also, the possible addition of an SD-card slot would eliminate the need for buying a camera-connection accessory made by Apple.

See Also:

• Ten Things Missing From the iPad
• Moleskine-Shaped, Bamboo iPad Case
• A Look at Some M-Edge iPad Cases
• Leather Cases Turn iPad into a Book

Samsung’s 7-inch tablet isn’t “dead on arrival” after all. In fact, Samsung has sold more than a million of them in less than two months.

Released in mid-October, the Galaxy Tab is the first serious contender to Apple’s iPad. It sports a 7-inch touchscreen and runs a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.

“I can confirm 1M Galaxy Tabs sold globally,” a Samsung spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

Holy moley. That’s not too far away from the iPad, which sold 1 million units in just 28 days. And it’s a number that should have Steve Jobs eating his hat after he ruthlessly derided 7-inch tablets during an earnings call.

“Seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,” Jobs said. “These are among the reasons that the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.”

So much for that.

The Galaxy Tab’s hot sales show that the tablet category has plenty of room for competition and growth. 2010 was truly the year the tablet became mainstream after several flops in the past, thanks to the success of the iPad.

See Also:

• Samsung’s Galaxy Tab: iPad’s First Solid Contender
• Samsung Galaxy Tab Garners Favorable Reviews
• Official: Samsung Galaxy Tab $600 on Verizon

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com