After suffering through several freezes, application crashes and restores, I’ve managed to string together two full weeks of stable iPhone operation.  After searching and researching multiple blogs (and a lot of trial and error) I’ve come up with what I think is a recipe for operational success.  It’s not that 14 contiguous days without a phone crash is anything to brag about [especially to Blackberry owners], but it’s the longest “winning string” I’ve experienced so far.  Here’s how I did it:

#1.  Completely wipe & reload the phone.
To be succinct, start over.  I don’t know if some remnants of firmware version 2.0.0, 2.0.1 or some early application contaminated my phone, but nothing I tried prior to this action cured my iPhone’s ills.

#2.  Load the latest firmware but DONT restore from a backup.
This is a painful step.  Doing this will trash your camera roll, SMS history, Safari history and application configurations, just to name a few.  Believe me, I tried restoring from several different backups without success before finally succumbing to this drastic measure.

#3.  Disable automatic syncing.
On three separate occasions my iPhone froze during a sync with iTunes and never rebooted again until I restored it.  I’m not certain what happened but I read several theories about the phone having problems syncing while some other process had it busy doing other things.  The only implication of this action is you’ll have to manually click the sync button in iTunes when you’re reasonably sure the phone isn’t busy fetching e-mail, updating your location or something else that might interfere with the sync process.  Since there’s no Activity Monitor to actually see what your phone is doing, you’ll have to use your best judgement.  To disable automatic syncing, in iTunes click “iTunes”, “Preferences” and select the “Sync” section.  Click this checkbox near the bottom of the window.

#4.  Forget the iPhone’s “App Store” icon.
Two of my “restore sessions” were triggered when I attempted to update or install applications over the air.  Once I tried to update three applications and once I did some shopping and bought iRetroPhone.  Do you remember the old joke about the man who goes to the doctor complaining “It hurts when I do this.” while wiggling his arm and the doctor says, “Well, don’t do that!”?  Same principle.  I only use iTunes on my laptop to download and install apps.

#5.  Be judicious with applications.
Like lots of iPhone owners, I was very excited when the App Store finally launched.  So much so that I probably wasn’t careful enough about what I installed.  I think I downloaded over twenty on the first day.  Judging by the number of updates that followed, at least some of them were obviously not quite finished.  Now, I don’t download version 1.0 of anything.  Instead, I give applications some time to “season”, read some reviews and generally practice “due diligence” before putting someone’s code on my phone.

#6.  Uninstall flaky apps.
Even the most well-written application can crash from time to time.  On one occasion, one of my apps crashed and threw my phone back to the home screen three times in as many hours.  It had worked fine for a couple of days before that so I figured it was an anomaly.  The next time it aborted it bricked my phone.  Four hours later, after restoring my phone, I made sure that application didn’t go back on.  I also wished I’d uninstalled it before it rendered my phone useless.

#7.  Reboot often.
Being a Windows system engineer, I know a bit about coddling a machine.  Does the term “Microsoft maneuver” mean anything to you?  Something you learn quickly as an IT person is that a reboot is almost always your first line of defense against wonky computer behavior.  Troubleshooting a Windows computer without rebooting first is like putting on your shoes before your socks.  It’s a shame to have to treat an Apple product this way.  I now reboot my iPhone (by holding down the “Display” and “Home” buttons together for a few seconds, sliding the red “Slide to power off…” slider, waiting a few more seconds and powering the phone back on) at least once per day.  I reboot before every sync and after any application freezes or throws the phone back to the home screen.  Am I being overly cautious?  Maybe.  The fact is, rebooting is relatively painless, taking less than a minute in total.

I’m not certain which of the above practices was the “silver bullet” that killed the restore monster (if it was indeed just one).  Maybe it was some combination of a few of them.  All I know is I used to restore my iPhone every other day or so on average. Now, that has ended.  I’m sure Apple will release a bulletproof firmware version eventually.  Unfortunately, we all need our cool phones in the meantime.

Hope this helps…Good luck!

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