I absolutely love my iPhone. I think it’s a great device, and had a lot to offer. Sure, it doesn’t do everything that you’d expect from a phone with a several hundred dollar price tag, and I’ll write more about that later, however for the most part, it is a damn awesome phone. The addition of the App Store further extended the awesomeness of the iPhone. However, thanks to the App Store, I’ve encountered my first major issue with the iPhone.

When the App Store fist opened, I downloaded several free apps. Actually, I think I’ve only purchased 5 apps total, most of which were $0.99. The free apps I’d get were those that I thought would be fun, or offer some value to me.

Then one day I was talking to a friend (who also has an iPhone) and he said that a free app that I had mentioned a few days before was no longer free. I forget which one it was, but I think it had moved to $0.99 and subsequently $1.99.

This forever changed my thoughts on “free” apps, and basically sent me down a path of get them before they are no longer free. And so I pretty much started downloading every free app that was released, unless I knew beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt that I would not use the app. So now I have over 130 apps downloaded to iTunes.

Yes, I’ve downloaded over 130 apps so far. Not all of these are installed, and some of them have never been installed. I grabbed some 3G speciffic apps for the day when Farrah get’s her iPhone (probably a few weeks from now) and when I upgrade my iPhone to the 3G (not to happen anytime sooner than Farrah getting her phone).

This is where I encountered issues with the iPhone. Apparently, if you have to many apps installed, the iPhone will start doing some funky things.

1) Ring tones would no longer play when someone called. The ring tone would still work when I tested it through the settings, it just wouldn’t work when someone called.
2) Only some of the iTunes songs would work. I was listening to my iPhone at work and noticed that some of the songs would play, but there would be no sound to them. There was no rhyme or reason to it, just about half of the songs played nothing.
3) Every application that was not a default iPhone app would crash. Started it up, see the loading screen, and boom it was back to the iPhone desktop.

I tried restarting my phone several times, re-syncing my phone, and even removing a number of apps. Nothing worked. In the end, I had to reset to my iPhone completely. - Word of warning if you do that… if you do the full on reset (which takes an hour or more) you will have to re-sync your iPhone to iTunes and reactivate it before you can use it again.

The Good news was after reactivating my iPhone it restored from a backup. Yes, iTunes makes a backup of your iPhone data! It even included application data in the backup, so I didn’t lose my notes, contacts, or even GasHog (3rd party app) data.

The backup of my 8 Gig iPhone took several hours to restore. I don’t know how long exactly, as I went to sleep while it was still restoring. After the backup restored, it had to re-sync the music (that is not included in the iPhone backup).

The moral of the story is don’t install to many apps, and always ensure you get a good backup!