iPhone woes

Very bummed that my mobile phone has gone offline. Won't boot either of the possible ways I know. When I push the power button, the little "I'm booting" logo shows up for 40 seconds, then the screen goes black again. Feels like something is very broken. Looks like I'll be taking a trip to the store tomorrow. In the meantime, I won't be reachable by texting or calling that phone. I've been pretty reliant on that device for communication, and health and financial data collection and analysis, among many of the other capabilities of the 350+ apps I have on there, so it feels like quite a loss. And just a *touch* of freedom...

Update Nov 3 - Could Murphy be on my side today?? The Apple online guy just told me through their Chat support facility, "your iPhone is still covered under AppleCare+ for another 3 days so any warranty repairs will be free and any accidental damage will be $49 for repair!" so I'm actually looking forward to my Genius Bar appointment tonight. — feeling hopeful.

Monday evening - Hooray, functional again! Very strange. They said the hardware was fine. They loaded new low level firmware to get it going.

I asked if one of the recent iOS updates caused this -- 8.0, 8.0.1, 8,0.2, or the latest 8.1, and they didn't think so. They said they've seen this phenomenon occasionally, and don't know what triggers it. No charge for the fix, though, which was nice...

Update Nov 4 - The last unrecoverable aspect of this, is the loss of the past week's app data, which would've been saved, if Sunday's backup had worked, instead of having the problem show up then. Everything from photos to financial records that changed since last weekend. Oh well, in the overall scheme of things, it's nowhere near as bad as it could've been, if I hadn't been doing regular weekend backups.

Update Nov 7 - After a dozen crashes and reboots since Monday's "repair", Apple replaced my phone. They ran diagnostics which indicated the Springboard App (the one behind everything) was having memory errors, and were going to reload the firmware again, but I talked them into replacing the phone instead. They advised me not to restore from backup, because of the risk of pulling a corrupted app back onto the phone. I mean, really? I have years of medical data I've been tracking in some of those apps. I am really bummed now.

Update Nov 9 - I couldn't stand it. I had convinced myself that memory errors had to be caused by hardware, so I bit the bullet, and restored from backup anyway. So far, so good...