Finally giving in to the fanatical iPhone fad, I reluctantly walked  into an Apple store two weeks ago and bought the highly coveted 3G smart phone. Clueless of my betrayal, my loyal Blackberry was joyfully bouncing in my purse, unaware that it would soon be replaced by a newer, prettier, trendier, Apple phone.

A hardcore BlackBerry fan since early on, I resisted the first wave of iPhone lovers’ oohs and aahs, joining instead with the contemptuous crowds who criticized its useless keyboard, its short battery life, and general frailty--I know at least a half-dozen friends and family who had their phone replaced or repaired more than once during the year or so that they’ve proudly owned it.

If anything, this knowledge should have made me wiser and more appreciative of the reliable BlackBerry that never failed me, despite numerous little dives in bath water or falls from high tables. But no, trends are more powerful than common sense, and how could I possibly resist a smart phone that looked like a piece of jewelry, promised fast web browsing through 3G, a GPS option, and access to countless enticing downloadable applications, some for free.

To be fair, I must admit that for the first two weeks my iPhone, renamed LuckyCharm, was everything it promised to be; it smoothly switched from Wi-Fi to 3G, offered a flawless GPS tracking system, and was a blast for downloading funky applications.

The excitement was short-lived, and less than two weeks after its arrival in fanfare in my life, LuckyCharm transformed into a flash light. Farewell 3G, GPS, and applications galore, hello bright White Screen of Death. I used every trick known in the repair book for desperate iPhone users to revive it, but nothing worked.

I took LuckyCharm the next day, a Tuesday, to a local Apple store and was told by a teenage girl/Apple Concierge with braces that I would have to wait three days to have a "genius" check out my dying friend. Three days without a phone was more than I could ever tolerate, and so I coldly let LuckyCharm go, opting for the replacement option.

I remained in the store for a few hours while various technicians tried to figure out a way to transfer my data from LuckyCharm to the new iPhone. No one seem to knew what to do, so I was sent to the AT&T store down the street where I learned from an AT&T sales person that iPhone’s contacts lived and died with the phone itself--unless you have a backup--and couldn’t be imported from phone to phone through SIM cards. Funny they wouldn’t know that at Apple…

One hour and fifty minutes later, I left the Apple store with a new, nameless phone in my pocket and a rotten Apple taste in my mouth. I wish I had patiently waited for the BlackBerry Bold to be released, sometimes this month, RIM says.

The White Screen of Death has appeared on various other iPhones, it seems. Videos posted on YouTube show many variations of the white theme, and specialists are all out speculating whether it is a software or hardware issue. I could care less; I feel like a fraud and wish I had never joined the rejoicing, fanatical Apple crowd.