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San Francisco - The door continues to revolve at Motorola, with the former head of the company's struggling mobile phone division stepping down on Friday.

Stu Reed was president of the mobile devices business until Motorola President and CEO Greg Brown took charge of the division himself in early February. Motorola said at the time that Reed would move into another division, but on Friday it announced he has left the company.

Motorola is searching for a new leader for the devices business. At a Morgan Stanley conference this week, Brown said he was spending about 80 percent of his time running the division. “In fairness to Stu, he inherited a very difficult situation. It needed help and more hands-on experience, so I assumed that responsibility,” Brown said.

Motorola has said it is exploring options for its mobile division, including spinning it off. The company has failed to maintain momentum in its mobile phone business since the development of its iconic Razr. In the fourth quarter of 2007,

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. - Motorola Inc. said Friday that Stu Reed, formerly president of its troubled mobile device business, has left the company effective immediately.

A spokeswoman said Reed had been preparing for his departure after Motorola announced last month that Chief Executive Greg Brown would take direct control of the division, which saw sales and margins fall last year.

Reed had led the division since last summer. The spokeswoman said she did not know Reed’s plans.

Motorola shares soared last month when the company said it may sell the mobile division, which accounted for $19 billion of Motorola’s $36.6 billion in sales last year.

The company’s cell-phone profit margin and sales slipped last year, and the company fell to third place on the global cell-phone market behind Nokia and Samsung Electronics Co.

Reed’s was the second executive departure announced this week as Motorola struggles to win back Wall Street’s confidence. The company said Thursday that its marketing chief, Casey Keller, quit at the end of last week after 17 months in the post.

Marketing will be handled by Keller’s two former deputies, Eduardo Conrado and Jeremy Dale, the company said.

Motorola shares fell 12 cents Friday to close at $9.82 — down 39 percent since the start of the year.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Yahoo Inc. increased two top executives’ bonuses last year amid a deepening slump that set the stage for Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited bid for the struggling Internet pioneer.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company paid its president, Susan Decker, a $1.1 million bonus in 2007, according to documents filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That represented a 29 percent increase from the $850,000 bonus she received in 2006, when she was still Yahoo’s chief financial officer.

Yahoo promoted Decker in June last year when co-founder Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as chief executive officer.

The company awarded its general counsel, Michael Callahan, with a $225,000 bonus for 2007. He received a $200,000 bonus in 2006.

The company didn’t explain what Decker and Callahan did to merit the larger bonuses.

The SEC requires Yahoo to spell out the reasons when the company files a proxy statement for its annual meeting later this year. The proxy statement also will contain other details about the total compensation, including salaries and stock options, paid to Decker and Yahoo’s top executives in 2007.

In Friday’s filing, Yahoo disclosed it set Decker’s 2008 salary at $815,000.

With rival Google Inc. widening its lead in the lucrative search advertising market, Yahoo’s profits slipped by 12 percent in 2007.

It marked the second consecutive year of lower earnings, a funk that caused Yahoo’s stock price to plunge 50 percent between December 2005 and Feb. 1 this year — the day that Microsoft announced a buyout offer initially valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 per share.

Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s bid and has been exploring other possible deals with News Corp.’s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL.

The effort to elude Microsoft is being steered by Yang, who received a $1 salary and didn’t get a bonus last year. Most of Yang’s estimated $2.3 billion fortune is held in Yahoo stock.

Yahoo also gave its chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, a $405,000 bonus for 2007. He didn’t join Yahoo until June last year.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is starting to look at how the organization might function after its current memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Commerce expires in September 2009.

ICANN, the nonprofit group that manages the Internet domain name system, has suggested it should become independent of Commerce Department oversight when the current Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the agency expires. The agency's memorandum of understanding with ICANN has been in place since 1998, but in recent years, representatives of some other countries have questioned why the U.S. government should have primary oversight of the organization.

ICANN has made significant improvements in accountability, transparency and other issues since the Commerce Department renewed the agreement in September 2006, said Paul Levins, ICANN's executive officer and vice president of corporate affairs. ICANN's goal after the Commerce Department agreement ends, he said, is to expand a global governance model that allows input from a broad range of Internet communities.

“What we're trying to do is ensure that the accountablities that the organization has now, the responsibilities to all the stakeholders, are locked in place forever,” Levins said Friday. “We want to try to lock in the existing model over the long term.”

Some people have suggested the JPA should remain in place to provide accountability. “The fact that ICANN is making progress toward meeting its responsibilities does not imply that the JPA is no longer needed,” Thomas Lenard, president and senior fellow at conservative think tank iGrowthGlobal, wrote in comments about the agreement. “Indeed, it may demonstrate the value of the JPA. The JPA and the continuing tie to the Department of Commerce may account for ICANN's good performance.”

Questions about ICANN's future have come up during a midterm review of the Commerce Department agreement. The public was invited to comment on the agreement and the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration hosted a public hearing on the agreement in late February.

As a nonprofit, ICANN operates with “almost no oversight,” Lenard added in his comments. “ICANN is a unique organization,” he wrote. “It is a nonprofit corporation under California law, but unlike literally any other nonprofit, ICANN makes decisions of major economic and social consequence throughout the world.”

The Center for Democracy and Technology and TechNet, a trade group representing tech senior executives, both advocated for a continued agreement with the Commerce Department.

But the expiration of the U.S. agreement would still leave ICANN with accountability, Levins said. ICANN still has a contract with the U.S. to operate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and its board members are elected by several groups. The organization must follow California law governing nonprofits, Levins said, and in a “next steps” document, it has proposed a procedure for removing the board if enough of the nominating groups agree on removal.

Some other people commenting on ICANN's performance have suggested the organization hasn't made enough progress on its goals under the Commerce Department agreement. The organization hasn't done enough work on internationalized domain names “to empower local non-English speaking communities,” wrote Khaled Fattal, chairman and CEO of Live Multilingual Translator, a company providing online English-to-Arabic translations. ICANN's inactivity on internationalized domain names has “seriously damaged potential good faith, trust, and belief in ICANN's competence in the eyes of the very people ICANN is seeking to appeal to today,” Fattal wrote.

But many of the comments on ICANN during the midterm review were positive. “It is our opinion that ICANN is living up to its mandate and that the endeavor of transitioning ICANN into a private sector entity is taking shape,” wrote Anthony Mugambi, chairman of the Kenya Network Information Centre. “Conclusion of the JPA would, however, provide the next logical step toward full transition some time in the future.”

ICANN's Levins said the organization is paying attention to criticisms. ICANN “could and should always do more,” he said. “Is there even a point where you can say… security and stability are done?”

But the organization also wants to more toward being more autonomous, as has been the stated goal of the agreement with the Commerce Department, he said. ICANN will begin engaging stakeholders about how a transition should work in the coming months, he said.

“The [Internet] addressing system is so fundamental,” he said. “We need to make sure that can't change and there isn't a point at which any one entity is able to change that, or can reconfigure that somewhere down the track.”

DALLAS - The chief executive of cell-phone chip-maker Texas Instruments Inc. got compensation the company valued at $10.3 million in 2007, 17 percent less than the year before as the semiconductor company’s profits fell 39 percent.

Richard K. Templeton’s compensation was detailed in a regulatory filing Friday by Texas Instruments, the world’s largest maker of chips for mobile phones.

Templeton, 49, received $932,120 in salary, a $2.4 million performance-related bonus, stock awards valued at nearly $6.9 million and $111,417 in other compensation, according to the proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The decline in Templeton’s compensation was due to less-lucrative stock and option grants. In 2006, he got grants valued at nearly $9 million when they were issued. The CEO’s incentive payment was slightly largely than the one he got in 2006.

The “other compensation” category included a pension contribution of $70,063, as well as $23,425 for personal use of company aircraft.

The Associated Press calculations of total pay include executives’ salary, bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year. The calculations don’t include changes in the value of pension benefits, and they can differ from the totals companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements.

Texas Instruments earned $2.66 billion last year, down from $4.34 billion the year before, and revenue also slipped to $13.84 billion from $14.26 billion.

The company also suffered setbacks when Nokia Corp., its largest customer, and Sony Ericsson decided to seek other suppliers for their handsets.

Templeton said Friday that, even so, Texas Instruments increased its wireless business in the fourth quarter compared to a year earlier. And he said his company would continue to be the largest supplier to Nokia.

Shares in the Dallas-based company rose 16 percent last year. They rose sharply early in the first half of 2007, then teetered downward the rest of the year. The shares of fellow chip-maker Intel Corp. fared better last year, but Qualcomm Inc. and Broadcom Corp. did worse.

Texas Instruments is scheduled to give an update on first-quarter results on Monday.

The company scheduled its annual stockholder’s meeting for April 17 at the company cafeteria in Dallas.

Chairman Tom Engibous plans to retire after the meeting, and Templeton, who also succeeded Engibous as CEO, is taking on the chairman’s role too.

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On the Net:

http://www.ti.com

San Francisco - AccuRev and Electric Cloud announced a partnership this week to boost software development productivity by combining automated build, test, and deployment capabilities from Electric Cloud with process-enabled software configuration management from AccuRev.

The arrangement leverages Electric Cloud ElectricCommander software with AccuRev to advance multistage, continuous integration and scalable agile best practices, the companies said. Multistage continuous integration is used to automatically build and test changes pushed to each stage in the development process. These stages include code creation, integration, quality assurance, and code reviews.

AccuRev enables development of a hierarchy and gives visibility into changes at each stage and merging between stages. ElectricCommander offers process automation to make multistage continuous integration scale and repeat, the companies said.

“Continuous integration and automated build/release processes are the backbone of shorter iterations and agile best practices,” said Cliff Utstein, AccuRev vice president of marketing, in a statement released by the companies. “AccuRev software is designed to enable these processes out-of-the-box, making a technology partnership with Electric Cloud a natural fit for AccuRev by completing the solution for software development teams.”

The integration between ElectricCommander and AccuRev combines and extends continuous integration best practices to solve the problem of slow builds and developers checking in additional code changes during the time a build is running, the companies said.

“We're finding more and more that enterprises are tying best-of-breed development tools together to provide a unified workflow,” said Jim Bell, Electric Cloud vice president of marketing, also in a statement. “ElectricCommander provides a robust automation layer that can unify tools, people, and processes. This integration with AccuRev will help organizations to not only enable continuous integration, but provide end-to-end traceability from source code, through the build and test process, to deployed application.”

Apple is readying significant enhancements to the software in its iPhone handset for later this year. The company takes cues from both the business and consumer worlds, finally letting third-party developers in on the action to bring games, utilities, and other apps to the phone.

These impending changes promise to radically transform the daily experience for iPhone users. Based on what we've seen of Apple's Microsoft Exchange integration and our first-hand look at the new development kit, here's what you can expect to see when the upgrade becomes available in June.

Down to Business

Within a few minutes after the initial wave of iPhone hysteria ran its course, business users began debating whether the iPhone was really ready to take on the corporate enterprise. The general consensus: it wasn't, owing to incomplete networking and security tools, and an inability to support the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol that keeps handsets connected to the central server. But the phone's widespread appeal kept interest alive in the business world, and Apple has responded by building Exchange ActiveSync directly into the phone, and revamping the iPhone's native e-mail and calendar apps. In addition, the company has added Cisco IPsec VPN support.

What does all this mean to you? If you're an IT professional, it could mean a lot. (At present, IT types are ambivalent about whether to trust the iPhone on their networks.) But even if you're not a network admin, or your company doesn't want to support iPhones, the update could still make your iPhone more functional at work: It makes it easy to configure your own corporate e-mail.

Apple recently demonstrated the phone's upcoming Exchange ActiveSync features, and even in its beta form the software looks simple enough for moderately savvy end users to set up without necessarily needing to call up their company's IT department. Like existing iPhones, the updated devices will display a selection of e-mail services to choose from. If a user selects Microsoft Exchange from that list–as opposed to, say, Gmail or Yahoo–the interface will present a standard Exchange settings menu.

From there, all you'd have to do is copy your login info and settings from your desktop or laptop's Outlook preferences and you'd be ready to receive push e-mail from the server, schedule and accept meetings, and browse the company's shared contact list as you would from the computer at your desk.

The basic Exchange features will be accessible to pretty much anybody with access to an Exchange server. However, some advanced features, such as the ability to remotely wipe the company's data off a misplaced handset or to use VPN, would clearly require your IT department's involvement.

VPN is particularly noteworthy: If your job involves a lot of work from the road, using sales leads, templates, or other data stored on a corporate server, you need VPN access. With Cisco IPsec VPN on the iPhone, getting to that data could prove a whole lot easier.

Currently, the iPhone's L2TP and PPTP VPN software requires users to get a lot of hands-on assistance from their corporate help desk to get a remote connection to their company's network (that is, if they're willing and able to do so). The popular Cisco VPN software should streamline VPN connections, requiring little more than a passcode from the end user once the device is configured. Setting up your VPN connection with IPsec will still require some help from your IT person, but it will make their job a lot easier.

Apps Galore

For most users, business data support may not be the biggest thing coming out of Apple's new software update. In fact, the biggest news may not even come from Apple itself. Apple has released its own software development kit (SDK) into the wild, giving programmers the tools they need to write native software–rather than just Web apps–to run directly on the iPhone.

The iPhone 2.0 update will include an iTunes App Store utility. Tap it, and you'll see a library of downloadable titles. Apple CEO Steve Jobs indicated that, while the purpose of the App Store will be to sell software for the iPhone, many of these apps will likely be free. Of course, that depends entirely on what developers decided to do. To get a better idea of what kinds of apps you'll be likely to see come June, we downloaded the SDK ourselves and took a look at the tools Apple is offering.

The iPhone SDK will give developers access to most aspects of the device, from the touch screen to the camera to the accelerometer that is responsible for sending when you tilt the device. Sample code available on Apple's iPhone Dev Center site includes examples of how to do many of these things. What's clear from these examples–and from the developer demos at yesterday's briefing–is that games will be a major factor on the second-gen iPhone platform.

With the SDK, game developers will be able to tap into the iPhone's accelerometer and discover new ways to control the on-screen action. By tilting the device in various directions, or with combinations of tilts and screen taps, you'll be able to navigate heads-up displays, virtual environments, and anything else game makers can dream up.

Meanwhile, with the Wi-Fi hardware readily accessible, new apps will be able to do everything from conventional Web surfing and messaging to device-to-device data and media sharing. And most of these development tools will have benefits for iPod Touch users also. So while Apple never implemented a Zune-like squirting feature for music–letting users send songs from one device to another for temporary sharing–such a feature could easily come from a third-party developer (if Apple doesn't kill it first).

Ultimately, the iPhone may very well shape up to be a major platform in its own right if programmers take to the SDK en masse. And if the App Store fills up quickly with cool tools and games, yesterday's announcement may prove to be a major one, even for those who have no interest in creating their own software.

San Francisco - Two brothers were sentenced Friday to multiyear prison terms for selling what the U.S. Department of Justice called “massive” amounts of pirated software online, the DOJ announced.

Maurice A. Robberson, 48, was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $855,917 restitution, while his brother Thomas K. Robberson, 55, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $151,488 restitution, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

On Nov. 7, Maurice Robberson pled guilty to conspiracy and felony copyright infringement, while Thomas Robberson pled guilty to a single count of felony copyright infringement.

Thomas Robberson made more than $150,000 selling software with a retail value of nearly $1 million through Bestvalueshoppe.com and TheDealDepot.net, the DOJ said. Maurice Robberson grossed more than $855,000 selling software with a retail value of nearly $5.6 million through CDsalesUSA.com and AmericanSoftwareSales.com. Both men have agreed to forfeit all their proceeds from the businesses, the DOJ said.

“People who steal the intellectual property of others for their personal financial gain, while defrauding consumers who think they are buying legitimate products, will be punished for their crimes, as today's sentences prove,” Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher said in a statement.

Two other people who conspired with Maurice Robberson to commit copyright infringement have already been sentenced, the DOJ said. Danny Ferrer, 39, was sentenced to 72 months in prison Aug. 25, 2006, for selling more than $4 million in pirated software with a retail value of nearly $20 million on BuysUSA.com. Alton Lee Grooms, 56, who helped start some of the businesses and gained more than $150,000 in profit, was sentenced on Jan. 18, to one year and one day in prison, after he cooperated with the government's investigation.

From late 2002 to October 2005, the men sold counterfeit software from companies such as Adobe Systems, Autodesk, and Macromedia at discount prices, the DOJ said. These counterfeit items were manufactured by their businesses and included labels that featured trademarks and service marks of the legitimate software companies.

After receiving complaints from software copyright holders about BuysUSA.com, an undercover U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent made a number of purchases of business and utility software. Law enforcement authorities found a network of sites selling pirated software, the DOJ said.

The most notable is the ATV’s automatic rendezvous and docking technology - the ship can find its own way to the station and attach itself without any human intervention.

“The ATV is how we contribute to the operations costs of the space station - by taking up several tonnes of logistics,” says Alan Thirkettle, the European Space Agency’s (Esa) ISS programme manager.

“It’s also very important as a development. ATV is a marriage of human spacecraft and satellites. It’s a very complicated spacecraft; and European industry has had the opportunity to develop new technologies and new techniques as a result of ATV,” he told BBC News.

The vehicle has been dubbed “Jules Verne” for Sunday’s flight and will weigh some 20 tonnes at launch. Its booster, the Ariane 5, has had to be specially strengthened for the task.

The rocket will put the vehicle - the size of a double-decker bus - into a 260km-high (160 miles) orbit, underneath and behind the space station. The ATV will then raise its height and edge closer and closer to the platform over a series of orbits.

For the Ariane 5, the mission also marks an important milestone - that of the heaviest single payload it has ever attempted to put in orbit.

The rocket is more used to lofting telecommunications satellites into equatorial orbits that go out to 36,000km above the Earth. For this flight, it will have to take a highly inclined trajectory out over the Atlantic to put the ATV on the correct low-altitude path to the ISS.

Ariane’s upper-stage will also have to reignite twice - once to circularise the orbit before ejecting the ship; and a second burn to take itself safely out of the sky and into the Pacific Ocean.

The ATV will essentially then be parked in space. It must wait until Space Shuttle Endeavour has completed its forthcoming mission to the ISS before moving in to make a docking, probably on 3 April.

The ship’s own computers will be in charge as an advanced form of GPS and, in the latter stages, optical sensors guide it into position on the end of the Russian Zvezda module.

Mission controllers in Toulouse, France, will keep a watching brief but will not intervene unless they see a problem arising.

Likewise, on the station itself, the astronauts will view the approach but will have no role other than in an emergency. If they do sense danger they can order the ATV to reverse by pushing a large red button on a panel positioned in the Zvezda module.

The ATV will stay at the station for six months. At intervals of 10 to 45 days, the vehicle’s thrusters will be used to boost the platform’s altitude.

Over time, the ISS crew gradually deplete its stock of food, fuel, water, air and equipment.

“And that’s when we also act as a dustbin,” explains John Ellwood, Esa’s ATV project chief.

“All the stuff that the crew has used during the six months that we are attached, they will put in ATV and then we will dump this in a very controlled re-entry into a completely unpopulated area of the Pacific.”

Europe has high hopes for the ATV and its technology. Although astronauts will not launch to the ISS in the ship, the vehicle is human-rated - they can go inside its pressurised vessel without wearing spacesuits.

The ATV is a starting point, therefore, if Europe wants to develop its own independent, crew transportation system.

At the moment, no Esa astronaut can get into orbit without the US space shuttle or the Russian Soyuz vehicle.

At their meeting in The Hague in November, Europe’s space ministers will be asked to build on the knowledge gained on ATV by approving a research programme that would investigate further technologies which could be used in a possible future human-launch system.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Some Apple press events are full of surprises. Others are…surprisingly dull. Today's iPhone software event was one of the few that was neither of the above. The news involved a lot of things that were not shocking-in some cases because of leaks in the last few days, and in some cases because they simply made sense. (Even the implementation of Microsoft's ActiveSync on the iPhone is just so darn logical that it felt natural and obvious.) But in this case, the obvious was also exciting.Which is why I came away mostly enthusiastic about the day's news and the future of this platform. Even the most controversial aspect of all this-that Apple wants to be the only distributor of native iPhone apps-seems more good than bad given that the App Store looks to be by far the best software delivery system ever devised for a mobile device. An awful lot of iPhone users are going to want applications of all sorts, and they're going to go to the App Store to get them. If I were a software developer, I'd be champing at the bit to reach 'em that way, not grumbling that I can't sell software directly. (On the other hand, I presume that third-party phone software resellers like Handango are bummed out by the prospect of being denied access to the iPhone ecosystem.So twelve hours after the event ended, I'm…happy. Even though I don't own an iPhone. I do have a question or two about all this, though. Ten of them, actually:1. Where was Microsoft? Today's event included a parade of representatives from other companies-EA, Salesforce.com, AOL, Epocrates, Sega-applauding the day's news. But the most surprising development to come out of the event was fact that Apple is building support for Microsoft's ActiveSync into the iPhone-and no Microsoft exec graced the stage. There wasn't even a slide of enthusiastic boilerplate support from the behemoth of Redmond. Did Apple not want Microsoft there? Did Microsoft not want to be there? I dunno.  But it's always a little uncomfortable when Apple and Microsoft jump into bed together.  (Remember Bill Gates getting booed during Jobs's 1997 Macworld Expo keynote?)2. What, no iChat? The iPhone's SMS application looks like the Mac's iChat, but it's texting, not instant messaging. Until today, I was assuming-or at least hoping –that it would evolve into a full-blown IM client. But today's event involved AOL showing an AIM client. It looked pretty good, but is it a sign that Apple has no plans to roll out real iChat for the iPhone, a move which would effectively render  AIM for the iPhone redundant? Or maybe AIM for iPhone is a placeholder while Apple works on iPhone? That doesn't make sense, though, given that the whole point of today's AIM demo was that AOL was able to put the app together in a couple of weeks. I'm having trouble reading the tea leaves here…3. What'll be prohibited? When Steve Jobs explained that all third-party native iPhone apps would be distributed  exclusively through Apple, he said that it wouldn't permit everything, listing porn, privacy-invading apps, and bandwidth hogs as examples of software that would be a no-go. Later, in answer to questions from the audience, he said that VoIP would be permitted only over Wi-Fi, not over the cell network, and that (surprise!) iPhone-unlocking apps would be taboo. But I'd love to know what other programs won't make the grade. “Bandwidth hog” covers a lot of ground, potentially, including many apps that compete with Apple's own iTunes Store media offerings.  (Then again, maybe nobody will find it worthwhile to compete with Apple when it comes to core iPod functions) A BitTorrent-over-cell client would likely be forbidden. But how about a BitTorrent-over-Wi-Fi one? How about Slingbox's mobile player or other TV streaming applications?4. How will companies know if their programs are verboten? Sounds like nobody will bother to write porn, spyware, VoIP-over-cell, or unlocking apps under the assumption that Apple will distribute them. But how about, say, a photo-sharing app which might or might not be unacceptably piggy from a bandwidth standpoint? Will anybody write useful and interesting apps and then discover it's impossible to get them to customers? 5. Will anyone figure out how to distribute iPhone apps without going through Apple? Probably. Will Apple do its damndest to make it hard, possibly through software updates that obstruct any alternate routes onto the phone or which disable apps that have snuck their way there already? Probably.

More iPhone Software Questions

6. Are there any killer apps out there? The Apple II's killer app was Visicalc-which was a third-party program which didn't exist when the II was released. The IBM PC's killer app was Lotus 1-2-3-which was a third-party app which didn't exist when the PC was released. The Mac's killer app was PageMaker-which was a third-party app which didn't exist when the Mac was released. You get the idea. There are going to be a lot of really nifty iPhone apps written in the years to come-even more so given the incentive of the iFund announced today. Is there a program yet to be written that'll turn out to be the phone's defining application? I don't have a clue, but I hope so.7. Will the iPhone be a killer gaming handheld? The demos of Spore and Super Monkey Ball we saw this morning were cool, and it's clear that the phone packs the video and audio punch it needs to enable a sort of miniature approach to immersive gameplay. And a lot of games are going to be a lot of fun when you interact with them through touch and joggling the whole phone. You could see developers latching onto the iPhone as a major gaming platform–and gamers buying one instead of a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. What the phone doesn't have, though, is anything like a standard set of game controls. Is anyone going to miss a gamepad or two and a bunch of buttons? How will we play Galaxian on this thing?

8. Will it be a killer productivity device? There's no question we'll see attempts at word processing and spreadsheets, but it's less clear whether it's going to be possible to do really good ones with the on-screen keyboard competing for display real estate. And while the Exchange support is a major step forward for business applications, the iPhone remains a device without a to-do list, something that's essential to my productivity, at least, as my e-mail and calendar. (Side note: PC World uses Lotus Notes, so the Exchange support won't help me a bit in my real-world workdays.)9. Even with Exchange, are there all that many IT people out there who will love the iPhone? The plaudits for iPhone as a business device this morning came mostly from organizations with strong ties to Apple-Genentech, Disney, Stanford University. I'll bet that there are plenty of businesspeople who'll try to convince their companies to adopt the iPhone, or who will plunk down their own money for one. But I still have trouble envisioning workaday IT guys becoming advocates for a device with such a high entertainment factor. Or to put it another way, if iPhone starts to chip into BlackBerry's dominance in the workplace, I think it'll happen very slowly, and probably through indirect routes rather than scads of enterprises buying thousands of iPhones in bulk10. Whither 3G? The biggest elephant in the room this morning was the fact that the iPhone remains a 2.5G phone in what's increasingly a 3G world. We know that a high-speed iPhone is scheduled to show up sometime this year, and that the combination of true mobile broadband and third-party apps is going to have an exponential effect on the potential of this platform.  I'd love to think that Steve Jobs is planning a June event to roll out the iPhone 2.0 software that will end with a “just one more thing” involving the 3G iPhone. That's a whole lotta questions. if you have answers to any of them–wild speculation or logical deduction are fine–or further questions of your own, I'd love to hear them…