So, for the second time in as many months, I've had to totally restore my iPhone because the OS crapped out during some operation. Unfortunately this time, I hadn't synced it recently, so I didn't have a backup. To add to that, the previous backup iTunes made reports that it's corrupt, so I haven't been able to restore to the phone any of my old data, SMS messages, images, etc. Which is annoying to say the least.

I find it incredibly hard to believe that I should have to have done this twice in two months. The first time it died during a sync, when iTunes was installing some new applications onto it. This time, it was when the phone was downloading and installing an application. Seems to be a common thread of application installation that kills it. 

I understand El Jobs himself has said there's a fix coming for application instability, etc, but I still don't understand how installing a single application can brick the entire phone. Surely this is a fairly major bug, and I haven't seen any widespread reports of people having this issue. Maybe I'm doing something differently, no t sure how, but who knows. From my understanding of the Sandbox nature of third party applications on the iPhone, they're totally self contained little bundles of goodness. So how is it that the installation of a single application can brick the OS?

I love my iPhone, I loved my first gen iPhone, and I love my second gen one too. But I'm forced to admit that it's also one of the buggiest phones I've owned since old Nokia 7210, and that's saying something. I really hope the 2.1 release brings some much needed stability and reliability.