Cupertino

Apple Inc. is giving its chief operating officer a $5 million bonus for "outstanding performance" running the company while CEO Steve Jobs was on medical leave.

Timothy Cook, 49, will also receive 75,000 restricted stock units scheduled to vest in 2011 and 2012, Apple said in a regulatory filing Friday.

Apple Inc. said it found more than a dozen serious violations of labor laws or Apple's own rules at its suppliers that needed immediate correction.

The findings were outlined in a company report on audits of 102 supplier facilities conducted in 2009. That was a year in which questions about the practices of one of Apple's suppliers came into focus after the suicide of a Chinese worker who held a sensitive job handling iPhones.

Nokia Corp. may be the world's top cell phone maker, but it's no longer a trendsetter, as a host of inventive and alluring technologies from North America is shifting the center of gravity in the cellular universe away from Europe.

Despite efforts to boost its position in the U.S., Nokia is struggling to compete with Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc. -- maker of the iPhone -- and Canadian smartphone maker Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry.

Options traders are betting Nokia Oyj will gain 14 percent by Feb. 19 as the world's biggest maker of handsets returns to profit and investors bet the company is about to introduce technology.

Speculation that Nokia will rise pushed the number of bullish options on the stock to almost double the level of bearish ones, the highest ratio in about a year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Apple is sending a clear message to developers: Play nice or get out. Apple made the message clear by booting out a developer and its approximately 1,011 apps from Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch.

To keep a clean store, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company banned China-based developer Molinker and its reported 1,000-plus applications, including Camera Plus, Color Magic, and eCamera. Molinker's applications range from photography to travel guides.

No one outside Apple knows what it looks like or any of its newest features. But news that a fourth-generation iPhone may already be in use fueled a buzz Monday on when the must-have device will debut.

MacRumors, a blog that follows Apple products, broke the story Monday that Pandav, an application developer, has monitored usage by an iPhone 3,1 -- a moniker unused by any previous models of the combination iPod and smartphone.

Apple will soon begin offering its iPhones through carriers in South Korea. On Wednesday, Apple jumped its last hurdle in getting the iPhone into the hands of mobile-phone users in South Korea.

Apple has won its lawsuit against Psystar, which has been selling Mac OS X in Mac clone computers. The decision in Apple's favor is expected to pave the way for Apple to argue its copyright-infringement case against future violators.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based software maker's claim against Psystar was granted, according to U.S. District Judge William Aslup's decision, and Psystar's anticompetitive claim against Apple was denied.

Users of Apple's Snow Leopard operating system have experienced some glitches. So Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.2 on Monday to eliminate several operating-system issues, problems with MobileMe, and issues affecting the quality and security of the OS.

The update, available on Apple's support site, addresses three times the glitches that version 10.6.1 covered.

Shares of Symantec Corp. soared Thursday after the antivirus software maker reported second-quarter earnings that exceeded investors' expectations amid signs that stabilization in its business has begun to take hold.

Shares of Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif., rose $1.46, or 9.3 percent, to $17.19 in morning trading.

Analysts latched onto the theme of improving business trends, with several increasing their profit and revenue estimates for the third quarter, 2010 and 2011.