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.

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Update 3 Sept 2008:

This image is getting a lot of Google traffic from people searching for terms like "iphone delete all contacts", "how do I delete contacts", etc.

That isn't really what this picture was about. In my case, it spontaneously & unwantedly hosed itself. As it happens, when I resynced to my computer at home later that day, the problem was corrected. And now that I'm on the 2.0.2 software, I'm seeing a lot fewer of these kinds of glitches than I was with the 2.0 software.

Anyway, some of you are obviously still looking for help, so let me try.

If you want to remove all contacts from the iPhone, the easiest way is to erase all the data. This may be overkill for you -- it also deletes bookmarks, music & videos for the iPod app, etc -- but if you're trying to wipe it to sell it or something, this may be what you want:

* go to the main screen
* go to the Settings app
* tap on "General"
* scroll to the bottom to "Reset"
* tap on "Erase All Content and Settings"
* follow the prompts from there

This is a good 95% solution if you want to wipe your phone. If however you are trying to erase it to sell it or something, it's better to do a Restore from iTunes on your Mac or PC. It's not hard to do, but if you can't figure it out, see Apple's support site.

If you don't want to erase everything, and really just want to erase the contacts, that gets trickier. The easiest ways I can think of to do this would be in tandem with iTunes on your computer. As I'm primarily a Mac user, I'll go over how I might do it from there, but you can probably adapt this to Outlook as well if you want (don't ask me how):

* attach & sync the iPhone, as normal.
* if you want to keep the contacts in Address Book on your Mac, have it do a backup
* delete all contacts from Address Book on the Mac
* in the iPhone section of iTunes, check the box for "on next sync, replace all contacts"
* press the iTunes button to sync the phone again
* when it finishes, uncheck the box in iTunes to sync contacts to the phone
* if you want your contacts back in Address Book, double-click the backup to restore it

That's the short version, maybe leaving out a minor step here & there, but it basically should work. If Outlook (or Entourage) has a way to clobber all contacts, optionally with a temporary backup first, then you should be able to use that approach there if you're syncing to those programs, but again, I can't help with details as I don't use them.