Working on the iPhone

My dog is messing up my game. A while ago, Apple loaned me an iPhone 3G, and after extensive "testing," I finally convinced my wife I needed to buy one. "What about your BlackBerry?" she asked. "I can use the iPhone for work now, instead of my BlackBerry," I said. Grudgingly (the latest iPhone costs $199 or $299, plus I'd have to pay Verizon a $120 early-termination fee), she gave me the green light. Then tragedy struck: my 10-year-old morbidly obese Labrador retriever Otto tore his ACL.

So much for the fragile Quittner family budget; the canine orthopedic surgeon in town (who has the gall to display a gold statue of a dog in his office) said the repair would cost $4,000. "I remember when I was a boy, all the old dogs limped," I pointed out to my wife as we helped Otto hobble over to his chafing dish of designer kibble. "You'll have to wait a little bit longer for the iPhone," she said. "Be brave."

After I ran up to my room, threw myself on the bed and kicked and thrashed for a while, I consoled myself by enumerating the various pros and cons I had experienced while using the phone, which runs on AT&T's superfast 3G data network. Because the latest iPhone, which went on sale in July, supports Microsoft Exchange--the industry standard for synching corporate e-mail, calendars, contacts and so on--Apple is pitching its phone to business users as well as to consumers. So, aside from cost--AT&T's rates for the iPhone are way steeper--how does it compare with my old workaday BlackBerry?