To restore or not? Could it solve the iPhone's freezes, bugs and crashes?

I'd like to think of myself as a patient type. The iPhone's numerous crashes, bugs and quirks have been noted here and there. Applehound does a good job of compiling them, some of which I've yet to experience. What I have experienced, though, is an increasing amount of lag and, well, my iPhone is "cracking out" a lot more recently than it did a couple of weeks ago. Performance is down.

This begs the question, is it time to drop the "r-bomb"? That is, to restore or not to restore? My friend Zach said his friends at the Apple Store in San Francisco said simply to "restore" the iPhone and reinstall and re-sync the dang thing. This is all well and good, but with a PC machine I'm not too sure that all my wonked out Windows settings will again translate to the iPhone. Plus, having to reconfigure the e-mail settings, making sure all my contact information is preserved, and saving all those SMS messages.... Not to mention the time it will take to transfer all my music, movie and other files over to the iPhone again. (OK, I'm sounding Pollyanna-ish, but still, it's a hassle.)

What to do? Argh!

[lloyddoppler]

maybe I'm not using mine enough

I guess I'm lucky: I have not experienced any performance issues and only had
one freeze so far. My biggest bugaboo about the phone is trying to get it to
sync with multiple macs as Jason Snell has described over at the MacWorld
iPhone Central blog. I spent a better part of Sunday futzing with it to no avail.

[lanceuppercut123]

Same here I do not know if I should restore...

I have not really had any crashes but I have not been able to charge my battery completely. Apple support said to restore my iphone but I'm not sure I want to do that.

[cougarswimnlax08]

Turn it off for a little bit

What seems to help my iPhone is just simply turning it off for 5-10 minutes. It seems like it wouldn't help anything, but it's important to remember that this is more than an average cell phone, it has many computer aspects to it which require alot more processer intensive actions than a regular cell phone. Just like turning off your computer every couple days sometimes help everything come back to full speed, this same action seems to help my iPhone just the same.

I'd turn it off for at least 5 minutes once a night before you go to bed before you do a drastic "R-bomb".

[Bigmo61]

Restore it! For all the good it will do.......

I have restored mine twice now and seen absolutely no improvement in
performance. Agree with earlier posts. Let it rest for 5 or 10 minutes and it
usually recovers. Generally speaking, web browsing functionality is so bad as to
make this feature useless. Mail is only slightly better and forget trying to run 2
funtions at once.

My question -should I return it and hope the replacement works better?

[cblock898]

What ive noticed that helps a lot is just resetting it, not restore.
just go to settings > general > reset > reset all settings.
all your content remains untouched (contacts, messages, email, music)
but pretty much just washes out the cache and unnecessary whatnots.
minor things like favorite callers, homescreen layout, and the dictionary
are reset to factory settings... not that big of a hassle. but good luck.

[imsorussian]

did anyone experience way slower internet when the new 3G iphone was introduced, my self and few of the people I know that own the first generation Iphones see a really big change in internet speed (not wifi)