I cut away from Photoshop World for a while yesterday afternoon to head over to the Orlando Millennia Apple Store for a Genius appointment, to try and persuade Apple to replace my fried iPhone.

No problem.

The tech spent ten minutes trying to get my iPhone to wake up, he used a little scope to peek up the headphone jack to make sure the moisture sensor was still white (it turns pink if the iPhone gets wet, voiding the warranty), and then he declared my old iPhone officially dead. He then did a little bit of paperwork and handed over a shiny refurb unit.

Yay!

I also decided to switch my service over to AT&T from T-Mobile while I was in the process of reactivating the iPhone today, avoiding the need to hack and unlock the new one.

(Hacking the iPhone has gotten trivially easy BTW - look here for details...)

Why AT&T now, after holding out for so long on T-Mobile??

I initially stuck with T-Mobile because I initially viewed the iPhone as an experiment - I didn't expect that it would fully win me over. It actually literally WAS an experiment at first, since a client was paying us to do some UI evaluation and research.

But the iPhone UI won me over. My biggest complaint was the lack of third party application support, but the new iPhone SDK has brought more developer enthusiasm to the iPhone than exists on any other mobile platform. Even on various PalmOS developer mailing lists, the main topic of conversation lately has been the iPhone. I expect that as soon as the iPhone 2.0 OS ships this June, there will be a plethora of amazing software released.

My other major complaint was the lack of 3G speed. That will almost certainly be solved by June with a major iPhone hardware refresh, and based upon how AT&T and Apple handled the 16GB iPhone model - upgrading will NOT require a contract extension.

AT&T will give me vastly better coverage than T-Mobile, and slightly faster mobile data speeds. My monthly bill will drop a trivial amount, and the one downside is that my monthly minutes will be cut from 1000 to 450. But seeing as I actually only use 300 or so minutes a month, that really isn't a loss.

AT&T has won me over. Now hurry out with 3G!!!