What's next for the iPhone? Who heads Apple after you? Will the iPhone get Flash? Is it going to officially launch in China? Is Apple forgetting its loyal Mac fans? How will Apple survive the current gloomy economy?

On March 4th, Steve Jobs and his team -- COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer -- answered shareholders' many questions at the company's annual meeting held at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California.

This year's annual meeting has been reported to be more eventful than usual. Shareholders passed a proposal for them to get inputs about the compensation paid to Apple executives. About the iPhone, Jobs remarked, "You'll see a lot of apps out there this summer." As for Adobe's Flash being supported on the iPhone, Jobs said the PC version of Flash "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and Flash Lite for mobiles "is not capable of being used with the Web" -- so maybe Flash isn't coming to the iPhone, at least not until the hardware gets more powerful.

Cook answered questions about Apple's negotiations with China Mobile; he said that as of then, they had only had "one conversation". There are reports of numerous unlocked iPhones already in use in China, and Cook said it would be above-ground: "I'm certain we will be (officially) in China one day." A question to Jobs about the possibility of Apple launching XServe for consumers along the lines of Windows Home Server elicited just this: "We don't comment on unannounced products".

Asked if the iPhone and iPod have taken Apple away from its original, loyal Mac user community, Jobs said, "We have a lot more customers now," and later added: "We do care. We drop the ball sometimes, when some of those customers have a problem, but the vast majority does well with their Apple experience."

Oppenheimer was asked if the state of the economy would affect Apple, and if he could make some forecasts. The reply: "We'll leave the economic forecasting for others."

Coming back to the proposal for shareholders to know about who was being paid how much, Jobs joked, "I'm hoping the say-on-pay proposal will help with my $1 a year" - it's one of those interesting trivia items, the fact that Steve Jobs gets a dollar a year as salary for being CEO.

So well, that's that -- all of it official and proper, and nothing really revealed except for the bit about Flash and the iPhone. We really did expect something less stiff than "the vast majority does well with their Apple experience" etc. etc.