And the Good News is? Apple's iPhone works in my house

As some readers already know, I've had to abandon my faithful Treo 680 because it wouldn't always work in my house. Sad, because I've had a Treo since they first came out, operating on T-Mobile, then Cingular, now AT&T.

Although it was only GPRS, I was able to read the news on my Treo, do email, Twitter, and write notes pretty darn fast. But the fact is, you can't very well use a cell phone for business if it doesn't work reliably in your house.

I was going to hold out for a new Palm Pre but it looks like that device is anchored to Sprint at the moment (my choice of "anchor" being quite intentional). And current speculation is that the Pre won't be available on AT&T until next year (per the TreoCentral forum). Sprint coverage at my place is zero. Verizon is better and so a Pre on Verizon might be appealing at some point in the future.

But for now, the iPhone 3G is my phone, which means I will be posting about this device in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, I got off to slow start because I bought the phone just a few hours before getting on a plane for a six day trip to England, where using AT&T data service reportedly requires Madoff-scale liquidity.

I was able to try the iPhone's wifi connectivity at my brother's place, but I was more interested in his T-Mobile 3G dongle. I will post about that elsewhere, but the short version is: brilliant! In a compact country like England this little USB key means you can pretty much surf from anywhere at up to 3Gbps, falling back to Edge speeds of around 384Kbps in all other areas, for a very reasonable fee.

As for my first impressions of the iPhone, well it's a beautiful day here in upstate New York, the warmest weather in months, and I'm just not in the mood for a rant about user interface design and missing warning labels. As a phone, I will say this for the iPhone: It works, in my house. (And the game where you shoot zombies is pretty cool plus the synthesizer I just bought at the App Store really rocks...)

p.s. Judging by the photo at the top of this post,  our dog Layla is able to hack into both the Treo and the iPhone.