Google’s antitrust accusations in Europe haven’t faded away as they might have hoped, and now new anti-competitive allegations have been levied against the search giant’s mobile operating system, Android.

The new allegations come from a French group called Fairseach whose members include Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle! The group claims that Google is deceiving users of Android and tricking them to use Google apps rather than competitors.

It’s all rather petty and honestly quite insulting. Android has been customized to benefit third parties ever since the OS launched. The latest example being Facebook Home which uses Facebook’s apps in place of the native Google offerings. Will Facebook also be targeted? What’s more, Android users are educated and curious enough to choose apps which they prefer and suit them best, it just happens Google’s apps often turn out to be the best.

We ask you Microsoft, if Android’s promotion of Google Apps is so terrible– why is it that you do the same with Windows Phone 8?

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It seems like iPhone 5 rumors are a dime a dozen these days, but some of them are really worth taking notice. Recently both 9to5mac and UBreakIFix posted photos of what they claim to be the iPhone 5, and both were quite similar. For both of these, one thing really stood out, the 30-pin connector was gone in favor of something much smaller. While either of these photos could be 100% fake for all we know, it is still interesting to think about Apple making the switch to a new connector.

While the 30-pin works perfectly fine, it also takes up a ton of real estate on the phone’s design. Some sites are saying that Micro-USB is the standard that is replacing the 30-pin connector. This sounds reasonable for a few reasons, the biggest ones being that the EU and other nations in the world have passed or are passing laws regulating Micro-USB as a standard. The second is that it is a proven standard and takes up as little space on a phone’s design as possible.

As far as the Micro-USB regulation though, Apple has already found workarounds such as offering a 30-pin to Micro-USB adapter, and could certainly do this again if they switched standards to a new proprietary format. While Micro-USB is a possibility, it would also mean that Apple docking products could work with pretty much any phone out there, and this just doesn’t seem like an Apple move to me. More than likely, if they are moving to a smaller format, which makes sense, it will be similar in size and form-factor to Micro-USB but will require a proprietary cable. Of course, that’s just one man’s opinion, for now all we can do is wait and see.

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Using the Google Maps in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland, you will be able to access traffic reports and to find out how congested a road is, if there are unexpected incidents or even gridlocks, so that they know exactly what to expect when choosing to go on a certain road. Moreover, they can use the Google Maps in order to find an overland route in case they want to avoid a jammed road or even a blocked one.

This live traffic information, available on Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile and Google Maps Navigation cover all the highways and freeways in the thirteen countries, as well as the larger roads in some main cities. The UK users are even luckier, as their routes will be covered at street level.

Traffic conditions are updated at a specified time and the reports are updated every 5-10 minutes.

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The European Union is going to set aside €4.2 million ($6.2M USD) for a project known as myCopter. This is a Personal Aerial Vehicle (PAV) that would try to reduce the traffic congestion in major European cities. The flying car would be used at low altitudes to travel to and from work. As myCopter would be flying below 2000 feet, it wouldn’t bother other air traffic, and would be fully or partially autonomous so you wouldn’t need ground-based air traffic control. The project is being undertaken by a consortium that includes the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany.

It sounds like the aerocar the Jetsons used, but more than likely annoying security and parking issues that many Brits face today. There’s already a lack of spaces for parked cars in Europe, let alone flying ones. Since this flying car wouldn’t fold into a suitcase like on the Jetsons cartoon, they’d have to set up a deal where people could land on the rooftops of their work. Currently the myCopter is a gas guzzler, which isn’t too friendly to the air, but the group hopes that eventually, the flying car could be electric.

The group plans to use unmanned aerial vehicles to demonstrate the flying car’s automation technologies, including obstacle avoidance, path planning and formation flying. Though maybe it would be better to develop a more efficient transportation system to get people out of their cars. In Hamburg, Germany, one of the least-congested cities in Europe, buses and trains coordinate their timetables to get people to hop on instead of drive. Some cities in Europe, like London, charge people to drive through congestion zones during certain hours of the day. It remains to be seen if adding more traffic to the air instead of the ground is an effective solution to reducing congestion, instead of a chaotic and expensive way to get people to work.

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