I spent an hour or so at the Genius Bar last night. It seems that my iPhone’s ability to find a 3G network was compromised. Probably dropped it on cement floors once too often. I dunno. Of course now I’m scouring Amazon for a new case…looking at an “Otterbox,” they look pretty durable.

The nice thing about owning an iPhone in D.C. is that you can always get some service just by bopping in at the Apple store. And the service is pretty damned good. I don’t know of many companies who will take a peek at your gizmo and, when it’s clear you have a serious hardware issue, will honor the warranty on the spot and replace the thing. But that’s what they did. They wiped my old phone and activated a new one for me and sent me on my merry way. That’s pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, one thing they don’t do a good job of at the Appley store is that of selling accessories. They don’t have squat to pair with your iPhone. Not even much in the way of cases. Oh well. I can always use an excuse to surf on Amazon.

Which brings me to the recent e-mail change. I have eschewed signing up for Apple’s “in-the-cloud” service, MobileMe. But, I recently figured what the hell, maybe in the 60-day free trial they can convince me that it’s worth $99 a year.

They did that in a day.

The synchronization is so good that when you delete an e-mail on your iPhone, it nearly instantaneously is deleted from your server. That ability to keep your mailbox cleaned up like that? Hell yeah that’s worth $99 a year.

So this guy’s new official e-mail address is as follows: aabp at me dot com.