While the iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple ends up calling its next handset) still hasn’t received an official announcement, the anticipation around its release is now so great that you can preorder it already – if you’re a Deutsche Telekom customer in Germany, at least. Bloombergconfirmedreportsthat had been circulating today about the move. A spokesperson for T-Mobile’s parent company said that it would allow customers to reserve the device if they “expressly request the successor model to the iPhone 4....

Germany’sSimfy, a music streaming service which we’venoted previouslyas bearing a striking resemblance toSpotify, has launched a Facebook music player. The new app allows the startup’s users to play Simfy’s catalogue of over eight million songs directly on Facebook via a player which can be posted directly onto their own Wall, or that of a friend. What’s interesting here is that Simfy has got this service out the door ahead of Spotify....

Germany has struck gold! Well, not gold, but it’s the electric vehicle equivalent. It’s actually discovered a rich vein of lithium, the precious metal that’s a vital ingredient in electric vehicle batteries. Asreported by Reuters, the European nation is sitting on enough lithium to make 400 million electric cars. The precious metal, geologists say, is thousands of meters deep below the earth’s surface in molten form, beneath the Rhine river. It spans an area 300 km long and up to 40 km wide, in the Upper-Rhine Valley in the Black Forest area of southwest Germany....

German lawmakers have voted for a bill that will allow highly automated vehicles (Level 4 of autonomous driving) to be used in regular operation by 2022. The bill was passed last Thursday by the lower chamber of parliament, theBundestag, as a draft law, named “Road Traffic Act and the Compulsory Insurance Act – Act on Autonomous Driving.” The vehicles that qualify as Level 4 autonomous will operate in defined areas and will include:...

Phone makers usually offer two or three years of software updates, and a couple of years of security patches after that for their flagship devices. If you’ve bought a budget device, good luck getting extended support for that. However, Germany wants to change this norm to improve the ownership experience for consumers, big-time. Lawmakers are pushing for a regulation that will require manufacturers to provide seven years of mandatory security updates...