The iPhone random reset

One of the more maddening iPhone troubleshooting issues is one in which the unit suddenly resets in the middle of operation, displaying the silver Apple logo and returning the user to the home screen, interrupting any activities that were taking place. This issue is most likely to occur when the iPod function is playing music, but can also occur when browsing in Safari and performing other operations. Some recent reports from Apple’s Discussion boards:

• “The new phone randomly resets itself. I’ll be in the middle of a text or browsing a page and the screen goes black and I see the apple logo. Then the phone powers on and works fine for hours or days, then it’ll happen again totally random time.” — jwilkinson1977
• “Mine has been doing the same thing. I have replaced the SIM card, restored it, brought it to the Apple store tech folks, restored again and same thing. It happens in all applications that I am using.” — Aileen Oregon
• “My iphone will randomly reset itself and show the apple logo followed by the typical boot up. It seems to happen most often when a song finishes playing in the ipod.” — djsteev

One workaround for this issue, though somewhat tedious, is to force quit other applications before using the application that frequently triggers resets. This can be accomplished by holding down the home screen button for several seconds while in the application that you want to force quit. For instance, if you are experiencing this issue while using the iPod function, first launch Safari and force-quit it, then launch the iPod application and check for persistence of the issue. Also, if you notice that the iPod function repeatedy exhibits his behavior when accessing a certain track or piece of media, try tempoarily removing the offending item and check for persistence of the issue. Other potential workarounds from our special report on troubleshooting iPhone application crashes are as follows:

• Safari-specific: clear cache, cookies, history Try these options first if you are seeing repeated crashes in Safari. Safari for the iPhone doesn’t have a very aggressive caching mechanism, but sometimes clearing it can trigger stubborn pages to load. Cookies can also become problematic. Delete them and re-try loading the page(s). Finally, deleting History can be effective on the Desktop versions of Safari, and may also be so on the iPhone. All of these items can be cleared by using the Settings application then tapping Safari.
• Full reboot Perform a hard reboot of your iPhone as follows: Turn the iPhone off completely, by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button (on top of the device) for a few seconds then slide the red slider. Turn it back on by holding the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears. This can clear potentially problematic data, preventing some crash-types.
• Keep adequate free space on the iPhone’s internal memory Like its desktop relative Mac OS X, the iPhone’s OS X operating system needs some head-room on the internal flash memory in order to operate properly. Try keeping at least 10% of the total space free to potentially prevent some crashes in applications, freezes and other problems.
• Restore the iPhone Try performing a restore of your iPhone. Connect it to your Mac or PC and, in iTunes, click the Restore button under the Summary tab. Restoring the phone will erase contacts, calendars, photos and other data on the phone, but will restore automatically backed-up information including text messages, notes, call history, contact favorites, sound settings, widget settings, etc.
• Erase all content and settings As a last resort, go to the Settings application, tap General then select the Erase All Content and Settings. This will delete all media and data on the iPhone, as well as recent calls, etc., and all other settings. If you perform this operation and stop experiencing crashes, you might have problematic data being synchronized to the iPhone that is automatically put back when the phone is restored. In this case, you might want to go to iTunes, select Preferences from the File menu, then iPhone and delete your backed up iPhone settings. This includes text messages, notes, call history, contact favorites, sound settings, widget settings. Again, one or more of these data might be problematic.