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living with the iPhone - crashes

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Now that I'm a few weeks into my relationship with my iPhone, he's started to leave the cap off of the toothpaste tube.

The issue is application crashing. It actually took me a little while to figure out that I was seeing crashes. I'd touch an app button and find myself at my home screen, and think that I must've touched something else on the screen instead of the button that I wanted. Unlike on my Mac with its 'The application [whatever] quit unexpectedly' dialog, the iPhone doesn't tell me when an app has crashed, I just find myself at the home screen. I wonder if this lack of user feedback on application crash was an oversight or if it was intentional.

Crashes seem to happen most often in Safari, although that might simply be because it's the application that I interact with the most on my iPhone. I haven't noticed that a particular website is more likely to make it crash. It's pretty good, although not perfect, about reverting to a useful state in terms of the windows that I had open when I re-launch.

Yesterday morning, as I was using the calendar app (which I use in list view because it reminds me of My Day) to see what my day was to hold for me, the whole phone froze. None of the hardware buttons did anything. After a few minutes of fiddling, I finally had to do a hard reset. If you haven't had to do it yet, you simply hold down the sleep button on top of the phone and the home button. After a few seconds, the familiar Apple logo will appear, and you can let go of the buttons.

Yesterday evening, I watched someone else struggle with Google Maps. It kept on crashing when he would use the arrow buttons to move between steps in the driving directions. He finally gave up on using it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still happy. I've even ordered a new foofpod to keep him snug and safe in my purse, since I like the foofbag that I use for Bernard the Blackbook so much. I can't stay starry-eyed forever, and this is one of the main things that has snapped me out of my initial intense fangirl drooling. But I am still in love, and waiting breathlessly for the iPhone's first software update.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2007
    Until we get a software update to (hopefully) fix the app crashing issues, I've found that turning off the iPhone and turning it back on again seems to help when it gets temperamental. One would hope for better, but at least it's not anywhere near as bad as it was with Nokia's WebKit-based browser -- it only took about 3 or 4 pages before it would complain that it was out of memory and refuse to load anything else.  And it didn't remember where you left off like the iPhone does.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2007
    I'm just chiming in to agree with what you've said. ("Me too!") Safari crashes on me a couple times a day, at least, and I've managed to crash Mail, Calendar, YouTube, and the iPod apps at least once. (I don't think I've gotten Maps to crash yet.) And just like you said, I still love my iPhone. I have mine protected by an Incase protective cover, but I take it off whenever I'm showing off the phone. Even though it only adds a small amount to the size, the phone looses so much of its cool sleekness with the cover on.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2007
    A coworker came to me yesterday because his iPhone took several attempts to wake from sleep -- it didn't reliably sense the "Slide to unlock" gesture.  I noticed that when it did sense the gesture, it was very jerky, not very responsive. So I turned it off (press and hold the power button, then slide to confirm).  When I tried to turn it back on, it wouldn't turn on! Pressed and held the Home and Power buttons for about 20-30 seconds, and it powered on.  Everything was back to normal. He hadn't turned off iPhone since he bought it three weeks ago.  (I'd restarted mine a few times along the way to resolve wonky behavior.)  Looks like iPhone may accumulate cpu-eating background processes, or have a memory leak, or something, that may cause performance to degrade over time.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2007
    I don't own an iPhone, but Tom Merrit on CNET's Buzz Out Loud mentioned that hard booting (sleep/wake button and home button at same time) solves this problem and the slide to unlock not responding problem.  Good Luck!