iPhone decided to delete all contacts

While trying to make a call, the phone locked up, then the Phone application crashed a minute or two later when the screen went black.

To get the phone to respond, I had to hold down the home button for several seconds to do the iPhone equivalent of force-quit on the Mac, or ctrl-alt-del on a PC.

When the Phone app came back, the contact database had deleted itself in its entirety.

"No problem," I think. "If I just turn .Mac push back on, everything will just come back from The Cloud. Except that 45 minutes later, no dice.

So by the time I got home, the database was still empty, so I tried to sync to iTunes. No dice, iTunes keeps locking up when trying to sync the phone.

AWESOME.

Eventually I got it to sync far enough to put the contacts back, but this is a royal pain in the butt. The iPhone 1.0 software never did anything like this, and until now, even on the v2 software, none of the core, bundled apps had crashed on me, even if the third party ones do regularly.

But now I can't trust the built in apps either. Including, most vitally of all, the Phone application.

What is the point of having an phone to begin with, if not to reliably make calls? Argggh.

Man I love the iPhone 2.0 software, let me tell ya.