[Gerard]

I installed gOS (Mac-like overlay for Ubuntu) onto my wife's ancient notebook, so she could continue using the decrepit thing upstairs for browsing and nothing else. The included Tux paint app made my 3 year old very excited, he loves to draw in just about any medium, and so it gets used for that now as well. On his third use, he managed to do something weird to the Main Menu such that it appears as a small blank patch in the corner with two arrows... so one has to scroll down though a long expanse of blank menu before getting to the actual shortcuts. How? I've no idea. Can't fix it either. I've given up trying, as we don't really need the menu, but I'm just pointing out that even something as allegedly fool-proof as gOS can be messed with rather easily in un-skilled hands.

I've known a number of Mac users who have lost serious amounts of irreplaceable data due to hardware failure, and in one case software failure. Every platform demands something of a learning curve. While the iPhone is sold as being dead simple, it is really only a matter of time before many, many users get vocal about their own tragic losses of information due to some glitch or other. These devices cost next to nothing to make - $100 for hardware on the high-end phones is the figure I see most often quoted - so really, what can we expect?

A sane response to fallible software and hardware on devices is to learn a thing or two. Having it handed to you and just accepting that it will work as advertise is a foolish stance. Take the recent Sidekick or whatever data loss. Sure, they seem to have got most of it back... but why were users not even allowed to make local backups of their information? I hope the iPhone offers a backup mechanism, something external to the device. If not, there will be tears.