Hasta La Gadget!

There have been other e-book price comparison sites, but I don’t think any of the others were built in 48 hours. A team of four developers built Leatherbound from scratch as part of this weekend’s Rails Rumble competition. It’s designed to help iOS app users (or anyone else who is platform-agnostic when it comes to e-books) compare prices across formats in a jiffy.

“No more searching the Kindle, Nook, and iBook stores to find the eBook you want at the price you want,” the site promises. “Search once with Leatherbound.”

There are a handful of devotées who own multiple e-readers, but Leatherbound is especially useful for readers who use the e-bookstores applications for desktops, tablets or smartphones — and consequently have greater ability and incentive to shop around. The inclusion of Apple’s iBooks suggests that the site is targeted for iPad and iPhone users, since iBooks isn’t available for any platform besides iOS.

Leatherbound has a simple but well-animated interface. When you enter in a search term (either author or title works equally well), you first get three matches for the book, with an option to load more results. Select a book, and the site fetches the prices from the Kindle, Nook and iBooks stores.

The book loads results as it finds them, meaning that it will show you a Kindle price even if it hasn’t yet found the book in Nook or iBooks. (When the site can’t find results, the “searching” wheel just never stops spinning.) Then there’s a button to tweet your search results — an easy way for readers to advertise a find or authors or publishers to let readers know about availability across the three major e-book stores, at least for iOS users. (Sony, Kobo and a few other e-bookstores are left out in the cold.)

Rails Rumble is “a kickass 48 hour web application development competition,” according to the official site, where contestants have “one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can.” The competition has become popular among developers using the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

According to the site’s otherwise self-satirizing “About” page, the four developers — Nathan Carnes, aka “The Hand of God,” Andrew Dumont (“The Suit”), Adrian Pike (“The Brain”) and Amiel Martin (“Mr Juggles”) met while working as developers for group text-messaging company Tatango.

When searching Leatherbound, be forewarned: like every new storefront, it’s a little crowded on its first day. An unexpected deluge of visitors from tech sites (including this one) have made the quickly-built service rather slow.

Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability [ReadWriteWeb]

See Also:

• Kobo Beats iBooks with International iPad Bookstore, App
• How to Transfer Your Stanza E-Book Library to iBooks for iPad …
• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Games, Chat, ePub: Imagining the Future of Apps for Kindle …
• Despite Reports, B&N Nook Competes Just Fine, Thank You
• The iPad Will Violate the Kindle's Space, And Other First …
• Apple's iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books …
• Kindle vs. iPad in the Sun
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• Kindle for Web, Blackpad, Sure; Amazon Android Tablet, Maybe …

There’s not much to say about the Bad Elf GPS, and that’s a good thing. The tiny, plain plastic unit, about the size of a box of matches, plugs into the 30-pin connector of any iOS device and magically adds GPS capability. It has a green LED to tell you it is working and a MicroUSB port for pass-through charging/syncing of the host iDevice. It costs $99, $10 more than the TomTom car-kit for the iPod Touch, and half the price of the Dual iPod cradle which also adds a battery.

The Bad Elf won’t turn your iPad into a Google Maps machine – you still need an internet connection to use GPS with online services. If you have an iPod Touch or iPad partnered with a MiFi device, or you use apps that store their maps locally, then you’re good to go – just plug the dongle into the port, wait for a lock and your apps will believe they’re running on a GPS-equipped machine.

This little box is probably more useful with the iPad than the smaller iPod, if only because the iPad had a battery beefy enough to sustain a notoriously power-hungry GPS radio. If you’re planning on adding GPS to your iPod, then you should probably pick the Dual for its extra battery.

If you really want GPS, though, buy the 3G iPad. It’s just $130 more than the Wi-Fi-only model, and you have a SIM-slot so you can always choose to add a data-plan later.

Bad Elf GPS [Bad El. Thanks, Brett!]

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Dual iPod Touch GPS-Kit
• First Look: Dual GPS Cradle for iPod Touch
• TomTom GPS Kit for iPod Touch

Verizon Wireless stores will begin selling the iPad in late October in a move that marks the first time the telecom giant is partnering with Apple — and probably not the last.

Verizon’s 2,000 retail stores on Oct. 28 will begin carrying the Wi-Fi model of Apple’s iPad bundled with a MiFi wireless modem to gain 3-G access. (Verizon’s network is based on CDMA technology, which is not compatible with the current iPad hardware, hence the need for a separate standalone modem.)

Verizon’s MiFi + iPad bundles will be priced the same as an iPad with built-in 3G connectivity for AT&T’s networks. The 16-GB iPad + MiFI model will cost $630, for example, the same as the 16-GB 3G iPad.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Verizon Wireless to get iPad into the hands of even more customers this holiday season,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, in a press release.

AT&T, too, will begin carrying 3-G iPads at its 2,200 retail locations.

The news of Verizon selling the iPad comes at interesting timing, as both the Wall Street Journal and The  New York Times recently reported that Verizon will carry a CDMA-based iPhone in January 2011. Now that Verizon is selling iPads, the telecom giant is an official partner of Apple, which makes the possibility of a Verizon iPhone more probable.

See Also:

• Verizon to Apple: We Want the iPhone
• Verizon CEO Throws Wet Blanket on iPhone Rumors
• WSJ: Verizon iPhone Debuts Early 2011
• Big Chunk of Verizon Customers Would Switch to an iPhone
• With iPad, Apple Still Has a Fatal Attraction for AT&T

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The Vega, a Tegra 2-powered Android tablet, has had a long and painful birth, but it looks as if it is just about to see the light of day. First shown off in November 2009, back when we were still calling the iPad the “Apple Tablet”, the Vega should soon be on sale in the UK, for a bargain-priced £250 ($395).

To be sold in the UK by the Dixons Group (in PC World and Currys stores), the Vega is incredibly well appointed for the price. At it’s heart is a 1GHz Nvidia T20 Tegra 2 processor and a 10.1-inch capacitive 1024 x 600 touch-screen. Then things get ridiculous: A micro SD-card slot (with 4GB card supplied), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, 3G-ready SIM-slot, a microphone, Bluetooth, 1.3-megapixel webcam and a battery which will play n1080p video for up to six and a half hours.

There is also a 1.5-Watt speaker, a USB-port and even and HDMI-port. The OS is Android 2.2 Froyo, and the RAM is 512MB, with 1GB option. Whew.

But it’s bound to be junk, right? How could they make it so cheap, with so many things packed inside? Well, take a look at this video and you’ll see that it actually runs pretty well:

Pretty amazing, huh? Apart from that awful keyboard, I mean. Without any official announcement of pricing and availability, we’ll have to wait and see if that figure is really correct. The Vega will sell under the Advent brand, which is just a rebadging for Dixon’s stores (the original MSI Wind netbook was also sold under the Advent brand, for instance). This appears to be the same Vega that was announced by Converged Devices all those months ago.

It’s been a while but, with this and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab due very soon, the competition for the iPad is starting to arrive. That’s good for everyone: iPad haters get alternatives, and iPad lovers benefit from Apple’s response to competition.

Advent Android tablets set to hit the Dixons Group stores shortly [Android Modaco Forums]

See Also:

• Vega Tablet Beats Apple and Crunchpad
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• How the Tablet Will Change the World
• Tablet Rumors Multiply as iPad Sales Soar

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Marco Arment created Instapaper, a tool that strips clutter from online articles and saves them for later reading, because he couldn’t concentrate at his desk. As the former chief technology officer for Tumblr, his Mac Pro’s screen was always pulling him away to do something else.

“In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions,” Arment told Wired.com in a phone interview. “When you’re at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.” Whether you’re watching a video or reading an article, he explained, you can always click away to check e-mail or switch to another application, ready to do the next thing.

What’s next for Arment is making Instapaper, the one-time hobby that became a beloved and award-winning iOS application, an even more powerful e-reading application.

Writer, designer and e-reading expert Craig Mod recently called Instapaper his “favorite digital reading experience,” combining the flexibility of HTML design with the clean minimalism of e-books: “It’s lovely and a great baseline to which other e-readers should aspire.”

To get beyond that baseline, Arment recently left Tumblr to work on his former side project full-time.

The purpose of Instapaper is to promote what Arment calls “attentive reading” in the face of digital distraction. It doesn’t reject the web, but affirms it.

On the one hand, it recognizes that we increasingly do more reading on computers and other electronic screens. On the other hand, it tries to extract items of lasting value, removing them from the most toxic aspects of that environment, so we can focus on them more effectively.

“People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.”

We accumulate thousands of unread e-mails — and the attendant guilt about not having read or answered them — only to empty out our inboxes and start over again. It’s as if we’re suffering from an entire range of collective information disorders: When we’re not binging, we’re purging.

Web media, Arment said, has evolved to fit this environment. Everything is shorter, bullet-pointed, structured to catch and hold a reader’s attention for a few moments, and then ideally e-mailed or tweeted or reposted.

Social networks and feed readers have developed their own alerts, guaranteeing that we keep them in our information stream. It’s the office productivity workflow, recycled for institutionalized distraction.

You might think that smartphones and other mobile devices would only accelerate this trend, and to some extent they have. Twitter comes from text messaging, and low-resolution viral videos are tailor-made for tiny screens. But when Arment developed Instapaper as an application for iPhone and then the iPad, he discovered something different.

“Instapaper wouldn’t be of as much value if it weren’t for these mobile and e-reader devices. They give you a separate physical context for reading,” Arment said. Away from the office, desk and desktop, with each application taking up the entire screen, a reader’s eyes and hands all have to learn how to behave again. For the iPhone, Arment even created a function that would auto-scroll through an article if you tilted it backwards, to take the user’s hands completely out of the equation.

The fewer productivity tools a device has, the better it works as a reading machine. “One reason I love the Kindle, more so than the iPad, is that on the Kindle you can’t do anything else but read,” Arment said. “It’s the best, because it does the least. It doesn’t even show a clock.”

There are a few ways to get Instapaper articles onto the Kindle in the Kindle’s magazine format, including wireless e-mail delivery and downloading and syncing over a wired connection. And though the iOS apps are still vastly more popular, he said, requests for Instapaper support on the new Kindle 3 have shot up exponentially.

Given this surge in interest, I asked Arment whether he might be gearing up to release an Instapaper app for Kindle. “It’s definitely a bigger market now,” he said, hedging a bit.

The problem for a content-delivery app is that Amazon restricts the amount of 3G bandwidth applications can use. Any Instapaper app would have to be Wi-Fi only and abandon backwards compatibility.

Another problem is that the current Kindle Development Kit also doesn’t allow as much access as Apple’s iOS does to core technologies like web rendering and hooking into other applications. Essentially, any Instapaper app for Kindle would require recreating all of the coding work Arment did to originally turn Instapaper posts into Kindle magazines.

“Amazon didn’t anticipate this kind of use of their devices,” Arment said. “What I’d like to do is work with Amazon to make what I’m doing now [delivery as a Kindle magazine] better.”