Angry iPhone...slight rant

[questionfear]

I've had the same issue 3 times now with my iPhone, and it's starting to really frustrate me.

Basically it freezes or hits some sort of major glitch, and so I either reboot or reset it. After a few minutes at the Apple logo, it tells me to connect to iTunes. I reboot AGAIN, and it works fine.

The first time this happened, I restored it through iTunes. The second time this happened, I didn't, and it happened yesterday a third time. I plan on restoring it tonight.

My frustration is that if there were an easier way to backup an iPhone than using iTunes, I could have treated it like a glitchy WinMob or Palm device, and hard reset it and restored from a backup. My only backups were on my computer, which in the last case was 200 miles away. It's incredibly frustrating, plus this last time it left me thinking that if the damn thing was truly well and hosed, I had no phone until I returned to NJ.

It's just another pain in the ass thing that reminds me that Apple, while excellent at designing a nice phone, seems singularly intent on reinventing the wheel in the smartphone conveniences department.

[RobbM]

Apple's definition of "backup" isn't the same as Palm's. Apple "backups" for the iPhone and Touch are settings and logs. It isn't a complete copy of the device like the Palm backup is. So that means you can't just copy the backup file from the iPhone from computer to handheld. You need an interpreter to translate the backup and put stuff where it belongs. That is unfortunately iTunes.

[questionfear]

Apple's definition of "backup" isn't the same as Palm's. Apple "backups" for the iPhone and Touch are settings and logs. It isn't a complete copy of the device like the Palm backup is. So that means you can't just copy the backup file from the iPhone from computer to handheld. You need an interpreter to translate the backup and put stuff where it belongs. That is unfortunately iTunes.

Very fair point, and now that I've gone through the looooong restore process and it seems to be on better behavior I am a little less annoyed.

What worries me though is that on several occasions it has basically "de-activated" itself. I'm getting a picture of an iPhone cord and the iTunes symbol, and it says "connect to itunes" and "slide for emergency" on it. The only way to cure that seems to be another reboot, which triggers an "iPhone is activated" pop-up like when the software updates. My fear is that it's going to flip out on me when I am away again, and then I'll be stuck without a working phone except for emergencies. Useful in the event of a real emergency, but when I need to reach someone for non-emergency reasons and my only phone has gone kaput 200 miles from my computer and it's only source of salvation, that's a HUGE problem.

And if I knew what caused it I'd be less concerned. So far it's been two wildly random events, where it seemed sluggish and needing a reboot, and upon reboot gave me the "Connect to iTunes" message, and once where it basically froze completely. The home button failed to exit safari, the power button did nothing, and so I left it alone to see if it would "wake up" after a minute or two. It reset spontaneously, and I got the "connect to iTunes" again. No pattern of use between the incidents, as they occured using 3rd party as well as Apple apps, and not while doing anything intense like playing music while pulling down a graphics heavy site.

[SpudNYC]

Are you using ActiveSync to connect to an exchange server? That is the exact behavior of a remote wipe from Exchange. Maybe your office doesn't like iPhones on their server.

This happened to me back in July and I thought it was my phone crashing.

[questionfear]

Good thought but this is personal only, no exchange service...

[berylrb]

QF, are you saying that safari was part of each crash, albeit the circumstances were different?

sorry to hear your angst! I hope your big fear does not happen.

[brickman65]

QF,

Seen This??? http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-10-20/

[questionfear]

Weirdly, that is the SECOND TIME TODAY someone has linked to that comic on a web forum I was reading.

Freaky.