Ballmer on iPhone: "quite nice," but...

Also here at the CTIA show in San Francisco, colleague Ina Fried managed to speak with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Ina asked Ballmer about a dead-on competitor to Microsoft. That'd be the Apple iPhone.

"Obviously, there's a lot of talk around the iPhone," Ina said to the fiercely competitive Microsoft chief. " When you look at the iPhone, what are the things that you say to the team, 'OK, this is an area we need to focus on'?

"They've (Apple) done some nice work and they've got their own set of challenges," Ballmer replied. " And we note both of those. Many people think they did a nice job with the gestures UI, you know, hats off to them. That doesn't mean it's perfect. But there is some stuff that they've done that's quite nice."