Even as Canada’s Rogers Communications and Germany’s T-Mobile compete to offer the worst voice and data plans for the iPhone 3G, Hutchison Global Communications on Monday unveiled what may be the best.

Hutchison (HTX), which stuck a deal with Apple (AAPL) in May to bring the iPhone to Hong Kong and Macau, will be offering customers a choice of two pricing plans:

• 8GB iPhone for HK$2,938 ($377) plus HK$188 per month ($24/month) for 500MB voice and data
• 8GB iPhone for free plus HK$498 per month ($64/month) for 2,200 minutes airtime and unlimited data.

“We believe the (minimum price) plan is comfortable enough for average data users,” a Hutchison spokesperson told the Dow Jones Newswire, adding that 500 megabytes will allow users to send 250,000 emails or browse Apple’s Web site 2,000 times. (link)

Bottom line in U.S. dollars: Including the cost of the phone, Hong Kong residents will pay between $955 and $1,532 over the life of a 24 month contract.

Some comparisons (all expressed in U.S. dollars for the equivalent of a 2-year contract):

• Hutchison in Hong Kong: $955 (500MB voice and data) to $1,532 (2,200 min., unlimited data)
• O2 (TEF) in the U.K.: $1,698 (75 minutes, unlimited data) to $3,588 (3000 min., unlimited data)
• AT&T (T) in the U.S.: $1,879 (450 min., unlimited data) to $3,318 (unlimited voice and data)
• T-Mobile (DT) in Germany: $1,366 (500MB data) to $3,374 (5GB data)
• Rogers (RCI) in Canada: $1,624 (150 min., 400 MB data) to $2,932 (800 min., 2GB data)

It’s taken more than a year for the iPhone to make its way across the world’s longest undefended border, which may help explain why so many Canadians are upset this weekend.

On Friday, Rogers Communications (RCI) — Canada’s largest mobile carrier and the only one with a contract to sell Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone north of that border — announced the details of its voice and data plans. They struck some would-be customers as unreasonably high and unnecessarily restrictive, especially when compared with those in the U.S. and the U.K., and thousands of angry Canadians have made their feelings known in various homegrown websites, including eh Mac, GeekCulture, and blog.r4nt,.

But the largest and most pungent protest is a petition whose original name was unprintable, but which can now be found at ruinediphone.com. Its stated goal is to gather 10,000 names — accompanied by a letter to Steve Jobs — by July 11, the date when the iPhone 3G goes on sale in Canada. By Sunday morning it had already gathered more than 10,000; by Monday it had topped 15,000.

The letter to Jobs begins:

Dear Steve,

My name is James and I would like to thank you for creating the wonderful iPhone device. We really think that you will change the world with it, just as you changed the world with the iPod. We were so happy to learn that on July 11th, we would finally be able to buy the iPhone and legally use it in Canada.

To our great disappointment, Rogers Communications Inc. has announced VERY unfair rates in comparison to AT&T in the United States and to other authorized wireless service providers around the world…. (link)

What’s wrong with Rogers’ rate plan?

For one thing, it comes with a mandatory 3-year contract. In the U.K., O2 offers an-18 month contract and throws in the iPhone for free. And although both AT&T (T) and Rogers offer calling, data and text messaging for $75 a month, Rogers at that price gives Canadians a third less calling time, half as many text messages, and puts a 750 MB cap on 3G data usage — with steep fees for users who go over their monthly limit.

It’s this last element that has struck Canadian Apple fans as most unreasonable. One of the features that makes the iPhone so popular is how effortless it makes websurfing and multimedia downloads — activities that can quickly rack up the megabytes. That’s why heavy users usually pay extra for unlimited data usage.

Rogers claims that its top data plan — 2 GB per month for $115 — is enough to download 16,000 webpages. But users point out that a single Facebook page can account for 1.2 MB, which reduces browsing from 16,000 pages per month to 1,600.

“It’s like they’re deliberately driving customers away,” wrote wolfscribe on CBCnews. “I’ll keep my money, ride out the contract and look for a new provider.”

Rogers does offer unlimited data through Wi-Fi sites, and it defends its pricing on 3G data as consumer friendly. “Unlimited plans could end up costing customers more for what they don’t use,” argues a spokeswoman. “Our iPhone plans more than accommodate the vast majority of customers.” (link)

Petitioners are asking Steve Jobs to pressure Rogers to offer a better plan — or cut a deal with another provider who will.

[UPDATE: As of Monday 9PM, ruinediphone.com is no longer responding, a development likely to spawn all sorts of Rogers Communications conspiracy theories. The site had reported collected more than 20,000 signatures before it went down.]

[UPDATE 2: The site is back up (DNR problems, we hear, not corporate censorship) and had gathered more than 30,000 signatures as of Thursday noon. Meanwhile, Ernst & Young has seen fit to name Ted Rogers, CEO of Rogers Communications, its 2008 "Entrepreneur of the Year." The award will be presented at a banquet in October. You can write your own punchline in the comment stream.]

Below the fold: Rogers’ iPhone rates.

This one is for Bill Gates.

He was 27 when I first met him. It was 1983 and he was in New York hustling a new laptop (the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100) that came with Microsoft software in ROM. I remember him rocking back and forth, as if to contain his impatience, when asked if there was an UNDO key.

In those days, before Microsoft became a software colossus, he or Steve Ballmer would stop by my office every once in a while to talk about their plans for the company. Later I would see another side of him through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But the Bill Gates I remember best is the one I spent two uncomfortable hours with in 1995, in the early days of his antitrust problems. We were in his Redmond office with Dave Jackson, then Time Magazine’s San Francisco bureau chief, conducting what was supposed to be the final interview for a Time cover story (Master of the Universe).

It was not going well. And it reached a low point when, in my memory, the chairman of Microsoft called me a communist. Later, reading the transcript, I realized he didn’t really say that — although he was pretty feisty. To my editors’ credit, they printed the juiciest parts of the interview — including a brief mention of Apple (AAPL) — as a sidebar to the cover.

In honor of Gates’ last days at Microsoft (MSFT), it’s pasted below:

INTERVIEW
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt, David S. Jackson
[Redmond, Wash., June 5, 1995]

Bill Gates displayed his well-known combativeness last month when TIME questioned him about Microsoft’s controversial business practices. These are excerpts from a two-hour interview with TIME technology editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt and San Francisco bureau chief David S. Jackson

TIME: Are you betting the company on Windows 95?

Gates: I don’t know what “bet the company” means. We’re a company with $4 billion in the bank. I don’t think we’ll disappear. We’re not like Time Warner, with $15 billion in debt. But if you had to take one thing in the next year and say what will our biggest impact on the PC industry be, it would clearly be Windows 95. Windows 95 is a very, very big deal.

TIME: Have you won over all the easy computer customers? Is it going to be harder now to convert the nonusers?

Gates: Well, 20 years ago, when we started, we talked about a computer on every desk and in every home. Now, if you take that to its extreme and say 100% of the people, clearly we’ll never get there. There’ll always be some people who choose not to participate, just like some people don’t use the phone or watch TV.

I see it as a continuum. That is, as more multimedia titles come out, as more information is online, as we make these things easier to use, we start to draw in more and more people. Now, once you get in for one application, the hurdle to learn a second one is fairly low. My dad wanted to do his taxes automatically. Then I got him doing word processing and now electronic mail because everybody in our family is connected.

TIME: Do you spend much time on the Internet?

Gates: Well, I spend a few hours a week just seeing the new stuff that’s out there. If you count E-mail, I’m on the Internet all day, every day.

TIME: We’d like to ask you about some of the charges that have come out in court.

Gates: This is old, old stuff.

TIME: We’d like to have it on the record, if you wouldn’t mind.

Gates: Are you, like, a historical publication or a newsmagazine?

TIME: Just last January, according to Apple, you threatened to stop developing for the Macintosh. Is this true?

Gates: We at no time, in any way, have ever threatened to stop developing for the Macintosh. I don’t even understand what it would mean. It’s the most bizarre thing in the world. What would we get out of that? It’s a big revenue source. It’s a profitable business.

TIME: Borland [another Microsoft competitor] charges that you used vaporware [the preannouncement of a nonexistent product] to screw up the development of Turbo BASIC. Which you did, right?

Gates: No! If you’re accusing me of competition, then yes. You have to decide. Are we optimized to help competitors, or are we optimized to help customers? Should we be open about our plans?

Do you understand what is being said here? The question is, are you allowed to tell people what your products are in advance?

TIME: Isn’t the point that if you’re a small player and you pre-announce a product, it has no effect, but that when a large player preannounces, it can freeze out the competition?

Gates: I’d say that’s pretty nonsensical. Let’s say you take a market, like the cigarette market, and you ban advertising. Who benefits?

TIME: The manufacturer with the largest installed base.

Gates: Installed market share, totally. So let’s have an absolute ban. You may never talk about new products in advance. But people do talk about their plans. You know, it’s this damn free-speech thing. It’s well established that communications is valuable for the efficiency of marketplaces. That’s all procompetitive stuff. This assumes that you like capitalism.

TIME: We don’t live under free, unfettered capitalism. Isn’t that why we have antitrust laws?

Gates: When did antitrust come up in the discussion? Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

TIME: I guess in Judge [Stanley] Sporkin’s mind it does. He’s saying vaporware is an issue.

Gates: You have to laugh. I mean, this is a judge who goes off and intentionally reads a book [a biography critical of Gates called Hard Drive] in advance and asks about some of it. It’s minor. I mean, you’re either here to talk to me about Microsoft or talk to me about that stuff. This lawsuit has nothing to do with Microsoft. Nothing.

TIME: Are we supposed to ignore the fact that there is a complaint that has Microsoft’s name on it?

Gates: There are probably 60 cases with Microsoft’s name on them. There will be at all times. Period.

TIME: Have you given much thought to succession?

Gates: I have a will written that, you know, talks about how the company should be run and who should vote my shares. There’s nobody designated as my successor.

TIME: How long do you plan to run Microsoft?

Gates: Well, I’m 39, and my response to that question has always been that for the next decade I plan on playing pretty much the role I am today.

TIME: You always answer one decade?

Gates: Yeah, that’s as far ahead as I can see.

The overseas iPhone deal that could prove to be Apple’s most important has cleared its final hurdle, according to two reports out of China.

“Apple is no longer insisting on a revenue-sharing policy,” China Mobile spokeswoman Rainie Lei told Reuters on Friday, “so the biggest hurdle for China Mobile to bring in the iPhone has been cleared.”

“We’ve broken through the biggest obstacle,” Gao Songge, deputy director of China Mobile’s general department, told Agence-France Presse. “And we are negotiating at the working level.”

China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile phone carrier, with more than 380 million customers. Talks with Apple had reportedly broken off over Cupertino’s insistence on getting a share of the carrier’s monthly revenue, something China Mobile said it would never agree to.

Although Apple (AAPL) has since dropped that demand in many of the overseas contracts signed this year, most observers assumed that the China deal wouldn’t materialize before 2009.

But Steve Jobs told CNBC two weeks ago that he expected deals with both China and Russia — the other big hold-out — to come a lot sooner than that.

“We just didn’t have a chance to get close with Russia and China,” Jobs told the network. “And I think you’ll see them happen later this year.” (link)

In a separate news item, MarketWatch reported Friday that China Mobile will be providing 3G cellular service at the Beijing Olympics using its own Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access, or TD-SCDMA, standard. Visitors to Beijing using WCDMA-based devices will get much slower connection speeds as service automatically drops to 2.5G. (link)

Remember the fuss stirred up last month when an Intel exec talked about a future iPhone that would be powered by one of Intel’s Atom chips? (See Anatomy of a Rumor: The Atom-powered Newton iPhone.)

What gave the rumor legs — and generated more than a dozen headlines on Techmeme — was the kind of iPhone that the Atom was alleged to be powering: a mini-tablet device like the ill-fated Apple Newton.

Well, the story is back, but this time in a form that makes more sense — and may shed light on what that Intel exec was really talking about in May.

On Thursday, JoAnne Feeney, an analyst with FTN Midwest, reported in a note to clients that the next generation of iPhones will in fact be powered by one of the CPUs in the Intel Atom line — a class of microprocessors designed for use in ultra-mobile PCs, smart phones and other portable and low-power applications.

As Barron’s Eric Savitz helpfully notes, Feeney is not talking about the iPhone 3G set to go on sale July 11. That one is still powered, as far as anyone outside Apple or Hon Hai knows, by the same Samsung ARM that drives the 2G model. She’s talking about a new and presumably better iPhone, due to arrive in 2009 or maybe 2010.

Neither Feeney or Savitz say anything about a mini-tablet.

Neither, for that matter, did Intel Germany CEO Hannes Schwaderer, speaking at an Intel event on May 14. Here’s the passage that set off last month’s rumors, as reported by ZDNet.de and translated by MacRumors:

“As part of an Intel event for the 40th birthday of the semiconductor company at Munich’s BMW World, Germany managing director Hannes Schwaderer confirmed today what has long been a rumor on the Internet: namely, that there is an iPhone with Intel’s new Atom chip. The device is slightly larger than the current version, Schwaderer said. That is not, however, because of the Intel chip, but because of the larger display used in the new iPhone.” (link)

Intel later denied that Schwaderer mentioned a larger display — or said anything about any future Apple (AAPL) products, for that matter.

Which makes a next-generation Atom-powered iPhone important news for Intel (INTC) and, presumably, Samsung (SSUN.F). But for the rest of us, not so much.

It was mid-May the last time FBR Capital Market analyst Craig Berger checked with his contacts in Apple’s supply chain, and what he heard then was bad news: orders for iPhones for the second quarter had just been been cut 25%.

But FBR went back to those same sources earlier this month, and on Thursday he and Robert Pikover reported “big positive revisions” in Apple’s so-called build forecast.

“Our latest checks show forecasted calendar 3Q and 2008 iPhone build volumes have been revised significantly higher, with more than 15 million 3G iPhones plus two million old 2G iPhones forecast for 2008,” they wrote in a note to clients.

Apple’s official target is to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008.

In other Apple (AAPL) supply chain news, Berger and Pikover report:

• More iPods: iPod builds were revised up 15% since their last report, with strong Classic and Nano builds offsetting slighly lower iPod touch builds — a surprise given the number of iPod touches being given away this summer in back-to-school sales.
• New iPods: “We hear a new, lower priced Nano may be coming, as well as refreshed versions of the Touch and Classic,” they write.
• More Macs: Apple’s 3Q notebook and desktop build volumes were revised up by 10% and 20%, respectively.

In summary, they like what they hear:

“For Apple, the firm continues to knock the cover off the ball in terms of product innovation, sleek designs, attractive price points, and effective global deployment plans. These checks confirm Apple’s product cycle momentum continues to gain steam.”

Via Seeking Alpha and Silicon Alley Insider.

One of the perils of writing about technology for a monthly print magazine is that by the time your story hits the newsstands, it’s often been overtaken by events.

Such is the fate of Daniel Roth’s long piece on Google’s Android project in the July issue of Wired.

Entitled “Google’s Open Source Android Phone Will Free the Wireless Web” and available here, it’s a well-reported behind-the-scenes look at Google’s (GOOG) effort to do for the mobile Web what Microsoft (MSFT) did for the desktop: provide the platform on which everybody else must dance.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone plays the same bit part in Roth’s story that the original Macintosh played in Microsoft Windows’: a inspiring example to show what’s possible — and perhaps be mined for stealable ideas — while the standard-setting steamroller grabs that 90% market share. Here’s the key paragraph:

“Those hoping for a new gadget to rival the iPhone finally understood that Google had something radically different in mind. Apple’s device was an end in itself — a self-contained, jewel-like masterpiece locked in a sleek protective shell. Android was a means, a seed intended to grow an entire new wireless family tree.” (link)

Google’s plan may yet work. But for Wired, the timing of Roth’s piece could hardly be worse. Not only did it arrive in the middle Apple’s carefully orchestrated drumroll for the July 11 iPhone 3G launch, but it landed just as the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Google’s plans have hit two serious roadblocks.

The first roadblock is the carriers. As Roth reports, Google was already having trouble getting the mobile phone operators to play along. The country’s two biggest — Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T), with a combined market share of 54% — passed. “There wasn’t anything viable we were willing to entertain,” Verizon Wireless spokesperson Jeffrey Nelson told Roth. So Google went with the third and fourth best, T-Mobile (DT) and Sprint Nextel (S). Now the Journal reports that T-Mobile won’t have any Android phones ready before the fourth quarter and has been sucking up so much of Google’s time with its demands that Sprint won’t have anything this year at all. Ominously, China Mobile, the sleeping giant Google was counting on in the Far East, but which has also been in talks with Apple, has also pushed back its Android launch.

Even more critical, if Google hopes to build a vibrant software platform, are the snarls developers are running into. As the Journal reports:

“The Android software has yet to win broad support from large mobile-software developers. Some say it is difficult to develop programs while Google is making changes as it finishes its own software…..

“Some developers say it is easier to work with Apple’s programming tools than Google’s because of the familiarity with the company’s Macintosh operating system. …

“Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google, says managing the software-development effort while giving its partners the opportunity to lobby for new features takes time. ‘This is where the pain happens,’ he says.” (link)

Apple, by contrast, has a waiting list of carriers around the world willing to sell the iPhone and thousands of programmers eager to write for the device; at its developers conference two weeks ago, Apple had to turn them away once the first 5,200 spots were filled.

“I’m rooting for Android, big-time,” writes one high-profile developer, John Gruber, in his widely-read Daring Fireball blog. “It’s easy to imagine how Android, as an overall platform, could wind up being better than the iPhone.”

But that’s a big if, he adds, before the paragraphs that cut to the crux of the issue:

“The big advantage Apple has with the iPhone is that they control the entire product, top to bottom. The case, the chipsets, the OS, the user interface. Apple knows exactly what the screen will look like when a brand new iPhone is turned on for the first time. Google’s dependence on hardware and carrier partners puts the final product out of their control — and into the control of companies whose histories have shown them to be incompetent at design and hostile to users.

“I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but my hunch is that the only way we’ll see an iPhone-caliber Android phone is if Google does what they’ve said they’re not going to do, which is to design and ship their own reference model “gPhone”. That doesn’t mean Android won’t still be successful in some sense if it remains on its current course, but that I don’t expect it to be successful in the “holy shit is this awesome!” sense that the iPhone is.” (link)

- - -

Nobody expects anything quite so awesome out of it, but the other big news in mobile phone operating systems Tuesday was Nokia’s decision to purchase the 52% of Symbian it didn’t already own, combine the different OS versions into one platform, and make it open and free. Symbian dominates the global cellphone market with 60% of installed base, according to the Nokia press release. Here’s Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer take on the acquisition:

“Buying Symbian won’t help Nokia build sexier-looking, high-end gadgets. But in theory, Nokia’s ownership will speed up Symbian’s platform development and could allow Nokia — its biggest customer — to come out with more phones, faster. That’s important as new competitors enter the market with sexier, more exciting products…” (link)

Even though none of the teardown shops has yet to get its hands on one of the new iPhones, we now have two estimates of how much the 8GB model costs Apple to build.

The first, from Austin-based Portelligent, put the Bill of Materials alone at $100. (see here)

The second, issued Tuesday by iSuppli in El Segundo, CA, is more detailed and probably more accurate. As shown in the chart below, iSuppli came up with a BOM of $126.84 before $9 in manufacturing costs and $37.16 in unspecified “other costs” brought the total to $173. (link)

[E-mail subscribers click here to see the chart.]

Also not included in iSuppli’s $173 total are an estimated $45 in royalties that Apple must pay to Qualcomm (QCOM) and others (see here) and fees due Hon Hai (Foxconn), Apple’s Taiwanese manufacturing partner.

Still, Apple has managed to build the second-generation iPhone for 23% less than the first one, by iSuppli’s calculation, while selling it to the carriers for roughly the same price.

iSuppli estimates that Apple (AAPL) is collecting $499 per phone from the carriers ($199 sale price plus a $300 subsidy), for an effective margin of 56%. Other estimates put the subsidy in the $325 to $350 range, which would push the markup even higher.

Below the fold: Commercial Times’ best guess of who is supplying the parts listed above, as translated by DigiTimes.

“You know, I think it wouldn’t be a party,” Steve Jobs told Fortune in February, describing the future of his company if, as he put it, Jobs got hit by a bus. “But there are really capable people at Apple. … My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors.”

Life at Apple without Jobs may be more than just a hypothetical. The 53-year-old Silicon Valley pioneer had a malignant tumor removed from his pancreas four years ago. With fresh concerns about his health following his gaunt appearance at the World Wide Developers Conference two weeks ago, it’s fair to ask: who’s on that executive team — and which ones have a shot at ruling Apple once Jobs leaves (even if he exits years from now and not for health reasons)?

There are 11 men in all — not counting Jobs. A handful are familiar faces to the small community of professional Apple watchers. As far as the general public is concerned, they are invisible, hidden in the long shadow cast by Apple’s (AAPL) high-profile CEO.

Some seem more qualified to step into Jobs’ shoes than others, but judge for yourself. Here they are, as listed on the company’s Executive Profiles web page, in rough order of their chances of succeeding Steve Jobs.

Timothy D. Cook: Chief operating officer. A 12-year veteran of IBM (IBM) and Compaq, Cook, 47, probably has more direct line responsibility that anyone in the company — even Jobs. Not only is he head of the resurgent Mac division, but he’s responsible, as his official bio puts it, “for all of the company’s worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Apple’s supply chain, sales activities, and service and support in all markets and countries.” Cook’s deep knowledge of Apple’s operations and ready command of detail has won him the respect of the board of directors and the investment community. A bachelor with a passion for cycling, he’s as steady and low-key as Jobs is temperamental. A Wall Street Journal profile described Cook’s dressing down of another man at a meeting as so “professional and surgical” it was only afterward that observers realized the man had just had his head handed to him. Although some wonder whether Cook has enough charisma to run Apple, when the CEO was out of commission, Cook was the executive Jobs put in charge.

Tony Fadell. Senior vice president, iPod division. With his American swagger and his hair bleached white, Fadell, 38, stood out at button-down Philips Electronics (PHG), where he led an in-house pirate operation designing Windows CE-based devices. It was there that he came up with the idea of marrying a Napster-like music store with a hard drive-based MP3 player. He shopped the concept around the Valley before Apple’s Jon Rubenstein snapped it up and put Fadell in charge of the engineering team that built the first iPod. Ambitious and charismatic (and no longer a bleached blond), he now runs the hardware division that makes two of Apple’s three key product lines: the iPod and the iPhone.

Ron Johnson. Senior vice president, retail. Johnson, 49, was a retailing star at Target (TGT) before he came to Apple in 2000, and he’s an even bigger star today, having designed what is arguably the world’s most user-friendly chain of retail stores. He shares Jobs’ single-minded focus on the customer experience, and when he parts ways with Jobs — the Genius Bar, where customers get hands-on troubleshooting, was a Johnson idea that Jobs resisted — he is often right. Most retailers focus on how you find the right item, he says, how you select it and how you get it out of the store. “We said there’s a bigger idea. Let’s design it around the customer’s life, not the moment when they’re in the store.” (link) Apple’s second-most charismatic public speaker, he is on several outsiders’ short list of possible successors.

Philip W. Schiller: Senior vice president, worldwide product marketing. An avuncular, unthreatening presence, Schiller, 47, plays a slightly rotund Sancho Panza to Jobs’ Quixote at nearly every Apple event. His deer-in-the-headlight performance — caught on videotape — when ambushed by a British TV reporter at the London unveiling of the iPhone contributed to the sense that Apple would be in trouble if Jobs were ever to leave. But it would be a mistake to underestimate Schiller. He has 24 years of marketing experience — 17 of them at Apple — and his official bio credits him with delivering a long list of “breakthrough” products: iMac, MacBook, Airport, Xserve, Mac OS X, Safari, AppleTV, iPod and iPhone.

Scott Forstall. Senior vice president, iPhone software. A veteran of NeXT, where he helped build the operating system that became OS X, Forstall came to Apple with Jobs in 1997. After proving himself by managing the team that released OS X Leopard, he was put in charge of software for the iPhone. “I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to make sure every pixel is right,” he told Time. “We will argue over literally a single pixel.” His profile was raised by public appearances at WWDC 2006 and the March ‘08 SDK announcement. In an executive shakeup three days before WWDC 2008, he was elevated to senior vice president, reporting directly to Jobs. “Forstall is the man if SJ gets to pick [his successor],” says 9to5Mac’s Cleve Nettles.

Jonathan Ive. Senior vice president, industrial design. Although his name is often floated as the next Apple CEO — and despite the fact that he garnered 49% of the votes in a recent online poll that asked “who would you trust to run Apple, without Jobs?” — Ive, 41, is probably the least likely of the leading contenders to take the job. Modest and notoriously shy (when he won the 2005 Design and Art Direction award it was Jobs who made the acceptance speech, although Ive was in the audience), he guards his privacy jealously; even Apple’s HR department doesn’t know exactly when he was born. Ive is perhaps the most influential industrial designer of our age. Why would he give up a job he clearly loves to take on the responsibilities of a CEO?

Below the fold: The also-rans.

Selling iPhones in the U.S. is pretty simple for Apple. There’s only one carrier — AT&T — and it only sells them one way: subsidized, with a 2-year contract.

In the rest of the world, it’s not that simple. As many as 70% of all mobile accounts worldwide are pre-paid accounts — in which you buy the phone and pay in advance for a fixed number of minutes. In third world countries, the percentage is even higher; in South Africa, for example, 9 out of 10 mobile customers get their phones pre-paid.

The problem for Apple is that iPhones sold pre-paid are unsubsidized. In Italy, for example, Vodafone and Telecom Italia Mobile have already let it be known that pre-paid iPhones will cost 499 euros ($778) for the 8GB model and 569 euros ($888) for the 16GB. (link, in Italian) The cost of an iPhone 3G in South Africa is expected to be 7,000 rand ($877), which probably puts it out of the price range of most of the population.

In a report to clients on Monday, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and his team address concerns on the Street (stemming from a June 10 report by Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi) that Apple might have trouble making inroads in the countries where pre-paid phones predominate — which is most of the nearly four score countries where Apple has iPhone contracts.

Munster et al. have had to adjust their model to take pre-paid markets into account, but conclude that Apple should still make Piper Jaffray’s (aggressive) numbers.

Their assumptions:

• That 53% of Apple’s addressable subscribers will be pre-paid, not 70%.
• That carriers will charge pre-paid customers not much more than $600 per iPhone
• That Apple currently has 20% of the U.S. smartphone market and 5% of the world market (according to Gartner)
• That 9 out of 10 iPhones will be bought under contract; 1 out of 10 will be sold pre-paid (see AppleInsider)
• That the smartphone market in 2009 will be 270 million units, or about 20% of the total phone market
• That a 17% share of the world smartphone market is “achievable” for Apple in calendar 2009
• Bottom Line. “Despite lower percentages of contractual subscribers in the global wireless market, the iPhone’s international rollout adds confidence to our estimates of 12.9m units in CY08 and 45m units in CY09.”

Munster acknowledges that early spot checks show carriers charging considerably more than $600 for pre-paid iPhones. But, he adds, “Our belief is the price will average out to $600 U.S. once there is global availability, and the phone is available at multiple carriers within a region.

“The carriers have huge mark-up on the phones, because they don’t want to sell an unlocked phone,” he says. “They want to force people into contracts. If we are wrong, and the carriers sell the phone for $800 US, this would be a negative for our prepaid units, with a slight offset as some may buy a contract instead of going prepaid.”

In other words, he believes Apple (AAPL) will collect the iPhone sales revenue one way or another.