The CEO of Philips Gerard Kleisterlee is joining Vodafone as the chairman. Sir John Bond will be filling in for Gerard and is retiring from Philips on March 31. Kleisterlee will be appointed as the non-executive director of Vodafone on April 1. Sir John Bond was the chairman for 5 years. This announcement is the “culmination of a succession planning process which the board initiated in February 2010.” Kleisterlee joined Philips in 1974. He became President and CEO in April 2001. [IntoMobile]

France Telecom SA, Telecom Italia SpA, and Vodafone Group Plc are arguing that Apple Inc., Google Inc., and Facebook Inc. should chip in to help pay for the billions of dollars that is spend on network investments.

When the Palm Pre 2 goes for sale in the United Kingdom, they will not be subsidizing the phone with a contract. The phone will sell for about £399. Mobile gadget site Pocket-Lint spoke to all of the major carriers to find out. Orange said “We have no plans to stock it at the moment.” Vodafone said “We don’t plan to feature the device in the UK range.” And O2 said “The Palm Pre Two will not be available on O2. We offer a range of the best handsets through our product portfolio and regularly review this to ensure it continues to meet the demands of our customers.” [Pocket-Lint]

The Vodafone Group is planning to sell about £3.1 billion ($5 billion) worth of equity in Japanese mobile carrier company Softbank. Vodafone gained equity in Softbank after selling them Vodafone Japan in 2006. The company is starting to sell off their non-core assets and they have raised their outlook for the year. They plan to use this money to reduce their debt. [DealBook]

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) is expected to name Lowell McAdam as President and COO. McAdam is next in line to succeed Ivan Seidenberg. McAdam led Verizon Wireless since 2000. Verizon became the country’s largest mobile carrier based on subscribers in 2006.

Vodafone subsidiary in India, Vodafone Essar Ltd. has hit 100 million subscribers.  Vodafone is the third telecommunications company in India to hit this milestone.  The first two are Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Reliance Communications Ltd.  Vodafone also submitted bids to participate in an auction for 3G mobile services this past Friday. [WSJ]

Ashley Towns is the first person to have created an iPhone virus, or so he claims. He does not regret writing it and he made sure to remind people that Rick Astley is here to stay. The iPhone virus is called “ikee” and it changes the wallpaper of iPhones to a picture of 80′s pop singer Rick Astley. A message on top of the wallpaper states “ikee is never going to give you up,” a pun on Astley’s popular song “Never Going To Give You Up.”

Towns, 21, said he created the virus out of boredom and curiosity. “I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that,” stated Towns in an e-mail to ComputerWorld. “So I ran a scan on my [Optus] 3G network and there was 26 phones running the service that’s vulnerable, and out of that 26, 25 hadn’t changed their passwords.”

Then he scanned the Optus 3G network and found 26 phones that were vulnerable. Of those 26 phones, 25 of them did not have changed passwords. Many jailbroken iPhones have a Unix utility running called SSH (Secure Shell). SSH runs using the iPhone default password, “alpine.”

Towns stands by his virus because it does not do anything malicious, even though it is a form of vandalism. He initially started by spreading the virus on the Optus network in Australia, but then he started targeting networks on Vodafone and Telstra. Towns even claimed he heard a report about his virus hitting a phone in China too.

Vodafone will be selling the BlackBerry Storm2 phone on October 26 for pre-order. The phone will be free as long as you sign up for a monthly contract at £35+. The specs of the Storm2 includes a 3.25″ 360×480 pixel capacitive SurePress display, 802.11b/g WiFi, 256MB flash memory, 2100MHz UMTS/HSPA data, 2GB memory, Bluetooth 2.1, and a battery that supports 6 hours of 3G talk-time. The phone will be powered by the BlackBerry OS 5 operating system. On October 15 the phone will be available in Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy, South Africa, and the U.K.