Is Microsoft's 'Mango' Enough?

Is Microsoft's 'Mango' Enough?

The latest Windows Phone software has some impressive features. But will it help close the gap between the Microsoft and its competitors?

DAVID ZAX 

Microsoft is upping its ante in the smart phone market. It recently previewed the next iteration of its Windows Phone software, code-named (and now more or less officially named) "Mango." Will it have what it takes to compete with the iPhone or Android? A tour under the hood shows that Microsoft seems to be onto something here.

An announcement from Redmond helps break down what makes Mango cool. First, Microsoft rethought the various ways people use smart phones to communicate. They realized that there were a few ways to make communication with smart phones more flexible. A "threads" feature will let groups—sets of people you lump together and label with a certain name ("friends," or "colleagues," say)—move easily between SMS, Facebook chat, and Windows Live Messenger, all within the same conversation. If you've ever had the annoying experience of forgetting whether a conversation was transpiring on text, chat, or Facebook, "threads" solves that problem. A few other features of note: Multiple e-mail accounts can be seen within a single inbox. Twitter and LinkedIn feeds come integrated into contact cards (Microsoft has long been enthusiastic about Twitter integration). And devices running Mango will have built-in voice-to-text and text-to-voice (a topic on a lot of smart phone makers' minds, of late).

Second, the Windows team rethought how we use apps. Wouldn't it be nice if apps announced themselves to us, right when we need them? Mango will connect apps to search results, doing just that. It also allows quick switching between apps, for the inveterate multitasker.

Third, Mango promises to "take the Internet beyond the browser." That statement is a bit grandiose, but it's clear that Mango at least offers an improvement over the Windows Phone 7 experience. A browser with HTML 5 support and hardware acceleration means a faster browsing experience. The phone will also offer hyperlocal search, as well as "quick cards" that give you a brief run-down of a product, movie, event, or place, potentially saving you the trouble of clicking through to find that information.

The software update has already stimulated some new hardware. On Wednesday, a Reuters reporter learned that HTC had plans to build phones based on Mango software. "We have some Windows Mango phones," the CEO of HTC, Peter Chou, said to the reporter "on the fringes of an Internet conference" in Paris, as Reuters colorfully notes.

Bear in mind, though, that Mango is an incremental update; a fuller software update on its phone software is expected next year. It may be until then that Windows really begins to cut into the market share enjoyed by iPhone and Android.

For more details on the phone, and an impressive demonstration on how its browser beats other phones—at least on certain media-rich sites—check out this YouTube video touting some of Mango's new features.

The Best Hard Science Fiction Books of all Time

The Best Hard Science Fiction Books of all Time

Ten titles that inspired Technology Review to publish its own collection of sci-fi stories.

STEPHEN CASS 

Technology Review will publish TR:SF, a collection of original science fiction stories, in the fall. The stories will all be near-future, hard science fiction, inspired by the kinds of emerging technologies we see in our coverage at Technology Review.

While we're not adverse to, say, a good bit of space opera or New Wave, we're focusing on hard science fiction in TR:SF, because these types of tales, grounded in the cutting edge of science and technology (albeit with varying degrees of artistic license), are the ones most cited by scientists and engineers as the inspiration for embarking on particular projects, or indeed, entire careers

Even if history later proves it utterly off base, a good hard science fiction story makes you think "That could actually happen!" That's certainly the case for each of our ten favorite hard science fiction books, listed in chronological order. Do you think we got any wrong? What are your favorites? Tells us in the comments below.

1. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (Jules Verne, 1870) Verne wrote some of the earliest works recognizable as science fiction (even though the term "science fiction" wouldn't enter popular culture for another 60 years.) Twenty Thousand Leagues is probably his most prescient work, anticipating submarine warfare (not for nothing was the first nuclear submarine called Nautilus) , scuba diving, and even the taser.
2. The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895) There's a little bit of self-plagarism in this book, as the operating principles of the eponymous machine are pretty much directly lifted from an earlier short story written by Wells, called The Chronic Argonauts, published in 1888, seven years before The Time Machine. Still, the 1895 book deserves credit for popularizing the idea that time travel might be done using scientific and technological methods, rather than the magical means used in earlier time travel stories. Its description of time travel in a four-dimensional universe presaged the cottage industry in theoretical space-time machines that has sprung up among physicists in recent decades.
3. I, Robot (Isaac Asimov, 1950) Asimov actually invented the word "robotics," in 1941, and this collection of short stories canonized his most famous literary creation, the Three Laws of Robotics ("A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.") Although Asimov was very hazy on how the "positronic brains" of his robots actually worked, the idea of a machine operating perfectly, but behaving strangely because of unexpected interactions between its instructions, would become all too familiar to later generations of computer programmers battling subtle software bugs.
4. The Shockwave Rider (John Brunner, 1975) The original cyberpunk novel, predating Gibson' Neuromancer by nine years (and even the word "cyberpunk" by five.) Admittedly, it doesn't feature a neon-lit virtual reality cyberspace, but it does have a hacker who unleashes a little doozey on the global computer network—a self replicating program that Brunner dubbed a "worm." In 1982 researchers at Xerox PARC noticed the real work they were on distributed computation doing bore a striking resemblance to Brunner's fictional creation, and by 1988 the first worm to be released into the wild was happily munching through thousands of computers on the early Internet.
5. The Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C. Clark, 1979) If we ever actually build a space elevator—a high tension cable 100,000 km long suspended from a counterweight in high Earth orbit all the way down to the surface of the Earth, which would let people ride elevator cars into orbit—people will look back on this book the way nuclear submarine designers look back at 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Although Clark didn't invent the concept of the space elevator, he did do some of the real-world calculations showing how such a structure might work, and even speculated that a carbon-based filament would make the ideal material for the elevator cable. Twenty years later, carbon nanotubes were at the heart of NASA first serious study on space elevators.
6. Cyteen (C.J. Cherryh, 1988) Set on a harsh world whose settlers have a fractious relationship with Earth, this book looks at an attempt to push human cloning beyond the creation of a genetic duplicate. Scientists try to recreate the personality of one of their society's most valuable citizens by creating similar childhood experiences, as Cherryh deftly explores the nature vs. nurture debate.
7. The Mars Trilogy (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1992-1996) This tale of the colonization of Mars begins in 2026 and ends two hundred years later, with the terraforming of Mars largely completed and humanity making its first steps into interstellar space. Packed with detailed descriptions of the colonist's everyday lives, and a close attention to the geography of Mars, it's as close as any of us will get to walking on the red planet. (If, sometime after reading this, you become an actual explorer of Mars, feel free to look me up and berate me for my lack of faith in you. It'll be something to tell the other people at the old folks home.)
8. The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson, 1995) This is the tale of an impoverished young girl who accidentally comes into the possession of one of the most sophisticated devices ever created—an educational primer that can adapt itself to almost any situation that its reader finds herself in. In creating the primer, and the entire world the child lives in, Stephenson has perfectly channeled Eric Drexler's vision of molecular nanotechnology, where microscopic machines perform near-miracles on a regular basis.
9. Rainbows End (Vernor Vinge, 2006) When I first read this book, I thought the setting of 2025 was unrealistically optimistic for the kind of augmented reality technology that is at the heart of the book. Using goggles, digital information from the Internet is overlaid on the world around the wearer. A person's social networking profile might appear beside their head, or an entire landscape can be mapped to some fantasy world, where a monsters and dragons are painted over cars and airplanes. But real world technology is catching up much more rapidly than I ever expected.
10. Incandescence (Greg Egan, 2008) Its far-future setting, and backdrop of a galaxy-spanning civilization, would normally put this book firmly into the category of space opera, but Egan—who has contributed a science fiction story to Technology Review previously—has written a book that could double as a primer on General Relativity and astrophysics. Much of the action takes place on a bizarre pre-industrial world, where the characters need to come up with some advanced physics—fast—if they are to avoid disaster.

Six Businesses Apple Just Wiped Out

Six Businesses Apple Just Wiped Out

Apple has a long history of taking the best ideas from its competitors and developer community and turning them into features in its core products -- here are the latest, from Apple's developer conference

CHRISTOPHER MIMS 

• 11 COMMENTS

The announcements that came out of Steve Jobs's keynote at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference today were many and varied. But never can I recall a keynote in which so many copies of existing features and services were announced.

In no particular order, here are the software products, web services and entire businesses that Apple clearly intends to wipe out with its new, integrated Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 features:

1. Instapaper

Instapaper is a staple of a certain kind of infovore. Developer Marco Arment has brought a Steve Jobs-like design perfectionism to the app-ification of the online readability-enhancing service Readability, which powers Instapaper.

So it should hardly be a surprise that Apple just integrated this entire notion directly into its Safari web browser, in the form of its Sarfari Reading List. As Engadget put it,

One 9to5 Mac reader found out that webpages saved using the tool are synced with iOS devices. This makes using Instapaper on your iPad pretty redundant.

2. Red Pop hardware iPhone camera button

It's too bad -- Red Pop was a great idea, and it's already fully funded on Kickstarter. Not only did it add a nice grip to the iPhone, useful now that smartphones are most folks' "real" cameras, but it also included the missing hardware button for snapping pictures with an iPhone.

Apple just announced that with iOS5, the volume up button on the phone becomes ahardware camera shutter button.

3. BlackBerry Messenger and GroupMe

Apple just made a stone-cold copy of BBM, called iMessage. It allows you to send instant messages to any other iOS device, and even do group chats.

GroupMe is an app that brings this functionality to the iPhone and other platforms.

(RIM, in general, appears to be toast, losing most of its market share to Android.)

4. Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music

Jobs more or less attacked both Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music directly. Not only is iTunes going to the cloud, as many predicted, but Apple has a secret weapon: a "Match" feature that will give you access to iTunes copies of all the tracks you've already ripped into your own library.

Jobs argued this makes Apple's cloud music service significantly cheaper than Amazon's or Google's, for comparable amounts of storage.

5. Google Docs and Google Chromebook

Apple's new iCloud service backs up your photos, your apps, and your documents, and also syncs them across all your Apple devices. In short, it does everything that's supposed to be so appealing about Google's new Chromebook.

Granted, there are some important differences. With a Chromebook, the OS really is the cloud, so it's possible to pick up where you left off on another device without doing any kind of significant sync. And there are bound to be hiccups in recovering from a crash on an Apple device. What's more, it's not clear that Apple's new iCloud service will reproduce the group document sharing capabilities that make Google Docs uniquely useful, such as real-time simultaneous editing.

6. Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the nicest ways to sync your music, photos and documents to the cloud. Now Apple's new OSes do all of that for you. We'll see what new uses DropBox finds.

Natural Gas Could 'Muscle Out' Renewables

Natural Gas Could 'Muscle Out' Renewables

A report from the International Energy Agency warns that natural gas could have significant drawbacks.

KEVIN BULLIS

• 9 COMMENTS

Natural gas burns cleanly, emits half as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as burning coal, and is extremely plentiful—especially due to new extraction technologies such as fracking. It seems like a perfect fuel for battling climate change.

But natural gas won't be enough to reach emissions levels thought to be necessary to keep warming below two degrees, according to a new report (pdf) from the International Energy Agency. What's more, it could have the negative effect of delaying the deployment of renewable power sources that could help reach those targets.

The report warns that cheap natural gas could cause government support for renewable energy, which has taken the form of mandates and other incentives, to waver.

Renewable energy is supposed to become more competitive as fossil fuels rise in price, due to increasing demand. But abundant new natural gas supplies, such as in the Marcellus Shale in the United States, could help keep natural gas cheap.

The report says that "lower gas prices may put pressure on some governments to review their policies and level of support" for renewables. In a press release, IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka said: "Its increased use could muscle out low-carbon fuels, such as renewables and nuclear - particularly in the wake of the incident at Fukushima and the likelihood of a reduced role for nuclear in some countries. An expansion of gas use alone is no panacea for climate change."

So, if natural gas does erode support for renewables, it could delay the cost reductions that come with it, making it even harder for renewable power to compete.

Natural gas could, however, be good for energy security, since natural gas is widely distributed around the world, the report said. If production were developed around the world, it would make it less necessary to rely on sometimes fickle suppliers, which in particular have left Europe vulnerable to supply disruptions.

The report notes that demand for natural gas is expected to be particular strong in China, which in its 12th Five-Year Plan called for the tripling of natural gas consumption.

GE Combines Natural Gas, Wind, and Solar

ENERGY

GE Combines Natural Gas, Wind, and Solar

The hybrid plant could be the cheapest and easiest way to add renewable energy to the grid.

GE has unveiled a groundbreaking power plant, the first to seamlessly integrate wind and solar power with natural gas. This 530-megawatt plant, set to commence operations in Turkey in 2015, is made possible by a flexible, high-efficiency natural gas system introduced by the company just two weeks ago. The solar thermal power system, a creation of eSolar, a GE-backed startup based in Burbank, California, further enhances the plant's practicality.

GE envisions a future where hybrid plants like this could become the norm in certain parts of the world. This innovative technology is particularly beneficial for countries operating on 50-hertz electricity, such as China and the European Union, as it could significantly aid them in achieving their renewable energy goals.

Adding solar power to natural gas plants is a familiar idea, but it hasn't been economical without government subsidies. GE says that because of its new turbines and related equipment, these hybrid plants can be competitive even without government support for utilities with the right combination of sunlight and natural gas prices. 

While combining solar thermal power and natural-gas turbines is not new, adding wind power to such a system is, GE says. Pairing wind with the natural gas plant helps reduce the cost of wind power—the wind farm can share some of the natural gas plant's control systems and its connection to the grid. The natural gas plant also smooths out variations from the wind turbines.

Solar thermal power involves concentrating sunlight and using the resulting heat to produce steam. That steam can be fed into the steam turbine at a natural gas combined cycle plant to boost its power output.

The solar concentrator array from eSolar helps lower costs in two ways. Its modular concentrator system is easy to install and modify for specific plant needs. It also produces higher-temperature steam than some previous solar thermal systems, increasing power output. GE has also developed a natural gas power plant that is highly efficient and whose power output can easily be adjusted to make up for variations in power output from solar power.

One of the most compelling aspects of this hybrid power plant technology is its cost-effectiveness. Connecting a solar thermal system to a natural gas power plant eliminates the need for a separate steam turbine and related equipment, resulting in a potential 50 per cent reduction in the cost of a solar thermal system. Jon Van Scoter, CEO and president of eSolar, confirms this. In contrast, Paul Browning, vice president of thermal products at GE, hails it as 'the most cost-effective form of solar energy available today.'