Your iPhone questions answered

David Pogue has an exhaustive FAQ on Apple's iPhone. Here are a couple of samples:

Do I need an AT&T account? Yes. The iPhone won’t work at all without a two-year AT&T voice-plus-Internet plan (and no, you can’t use it as just an iPod, no matter how tempting the bigger screen and longer battery life is).

Why didn’t Apple use AT&T’s faster 3G Internet network? Apple says that today’s relatively unpolished 3G (third generation) radio chips would drain the battery too fast — and at this point, wouldn’t provide enough of a speed boost to justify that trade-off. Apple will release a 3G iPhone model when the time seems right.

How snappy is the real iPhone, compared with Apple’s ads? It’s identical, with one exception: Apple never shows the iPhone when it’s on AT&T’s cellular network. That would just be embarrassing.