The most prevalent lament among the early iPhone reviewers: the speed of AT&T’s Edge network. Apple CEO Steve Jobs and new AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson addressed the issue and others in joint interviews Thursday.

NYT: Stephenson said the criticism of the network choice “doesn’t concern me” and suggested the WiFi would make up for it. He added later: “... there’s not a 3G network available in Ottumwa, Iowa. If you want to sell these devices in a variety of places, Edge is the only opportunity you have.”

Jobs: “Edge is good, but you’d like it to be faster.” He said the hardware design team decided against 3G because the chipsets are power-hungry. “We felt it wasn’t the right trade-off now. ... I’m sure that will all change in the future.”

Business model: In a major switch, Apple will handle account management, not the phone company. Stephenson: “That’s what the customers want and you can give them a good experience. Why would we not do that? I like this model a lot.”

WSJ: This link goes to excerpts of the paper’s interview.

More on Edge: Stephenson: “If you think about wireless broadband networks, Edge is the only ubiquitous nationwide broadband network deployed today. ... The service experience is really, really good and what you’re going to see with the iPhone is the caching technology that Steve and the Apple guys have developed here makes the Edge experience even better.”

Jobs: “There’s often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you’re sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody’s home Wi-Fi network. What we found is the combination is working really well.” (Think he realizes piggybacking can be illegal in some place and can cause ISP problems for the account holder?) Stephenson says this is AT&T’s first combo wireless/WiFi device, which might come as a surprise to HTC—maker of the combo wireless/WiFi 8125 I’ve been using for more than a year. It doesn’t make seamless transitions but has both.)

Why not a real MVNO? (I say real because what they are doing now bears a great deal of resemblance to one.) Jobs: “We started off thinking we should do an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) and in talking that through with AT&T, both of us came to the realization that would just be a big waste of energy. We’d be trying to duplicate a lot of things they were already doing at a much greater scale.”

Also, USA Today has its own version.