iPhone frustration: New apps won't start - Help!

Factual Questions
1

My wife just got a new iPhone for Christmas. iPhone 3G, 8GB. Yeah, she got it early.

Anyway, she downloaded a few apps - Facebook, Nightstand, a few others. They ran fine.

That was three hours ago. Now they do not run at all. If you select them, the iPhone goes blank, pauses, then simply acts as if you hadn’t selected anything. Note that in the interim, she synched her iTunes. (That worked.)

Reset will work to fix that, right? Nope. Doesn’t work at all. The new apps will not start. The standard applications start fine; new ones are completely non functional.

Help.

2

Did the iTunes sync update her software?

I had a similar problem with the Facebook application when I was running version 2.1. I synced and updated to 2.2, then Facebook wouldn’t run.

I fixed it by deleting the Facebook app from the phone, and re-downloading/installing from the App Store.

3

When you say “reset”, do you mean a hard reset, holding down the top and home buttons for ten seconds or so?

If not, I’d recommend:

  1. Turn off and back on (hold down top button for a bit, you’ll see a slider to turn it off). If that doesn’t work …

  2. Hard reset (described above). If that doesn’t work …

  3. Delete app and reinstall. If that doesn’t work …

  4. Restore phone using iTunes.

4

How do you uninstall an application?

Thanks for help so far.

5

Delete it in iTunes. Or better (if it’s a paid app), just go to the applications tab and uncheck the box for it. Then re-sync.

I’d just do a complete restore, though. You’ll lose the pictures on the phone if the backup doesn’t work (I’ve had about 50/50 success), but everything else is in iTunes anyway, and it only takes a few minutes to do. If you want the pictures, you can save them out with your favorite photo-downloading app, first.

6

Hold your finger on the app icon a couple of seconds until all the apps start to wobble. Then you can delete the ones that you installed by clicking the X. Click the home button to stop the wobbling again.