Detailed Account of iPhone 4 not turning on after screen goes out.

Question

Hello,
This is my first iPhone and in the last week it has been annoying. I have been a Mac person for 11 years and this phone is awesome but this problem I am having is not. It started about a week after I had the phone (I have had the phone almost a month now), it seems that when the screen goes blank from inactivity the phone will not come on after pushing the power or home buttons. This requires a hard restart and the phone will come back on. The first time it happened it was a single incident so i Dismissed it all together, but this week it has been happening to me again except this time i did a little more troubleshooting and research on the issue, I do not have in apple store in my location and it was hard enough trying to get the phone and i really do not want to send this back to wait for another phone for two weeks, but unfortunately i will have to.
Monday I was bored at work and did my usual browse threw the app store purchased a flashlight app for the LED flash on the camera , all seemed well throughout the day. the next morning on the problem started over again. everytime the screen would go blank from inactivity i would have to hard restart the phone. now keep in mind this will only do this from inactivity, if I am playing music in the background and the phone goes off it will still come back on, no problem. So i did some googling and came across a few people having the same issue but no one really giving any details. i went home for lunch and got the new 4.0.2 update hoping this would work, nada.... seemed the only way to remedy the situation was to restore phone to factory settings. I did this tuesday afternoon and all was fine until today , thursday, I received updates for a few apps today (predators, facebook and retina wallpapers hd) now the same problem is happening again.
This has to be a software issue, it would be awesome if anyone else having the same problem can comment on their issue and try to give as much detail (time, dates, apps, updates) as possible. I have owned three apple machines over the last 11 years, I am a die hard apple guy thru and thru from the age of 13 and wouldn't have it any other way, but it would seem apple should have tested this phone out a little more thoroughly. If i had an applestore in key west i would be more than happy to deal with them over there but I am on an island 120 miles away from the nearest walmart so I am sorta screwed. It would be awesome if an apple tech or moderator could reply so I at least know you guys have a detailed account of what is going on, also please feel free to contact me via email.
<Edited by Host>

Answer 1

I have been trying for the last half an hour to recreate the problem with out the case on and i cant recreate the issue. the phone is coming up fine, i have restarted the phone twice to see if the problem would come up after a restart and no go.
I just got off the phone with katy at otterbox and she is telling that they have not had any issues with the case but i have explained to her my whole issue and that i have trouble shooted the issue without the case on the phone itself and i cannot get it to happen again.
i currently have it in the case and am going to try and recreate the issue again. if the issue comes back up i wont hard restart it on the spot i will take the phone out of the case and then try the home button. if the phone works, its the case, if it doesnt work it has to be the phone.
now my thinking is that this occurred after a software update, I am wondering if the software that I have on the phone might be taking the overheating temperature threshold up. as in before i installed the software the phone would go out at so&so degrees then after i installed the software it takes it up to so & so degrees and the otterbox is making it just warm enough to turn the phone off.
another quick note that i am wondering about...
this monday i had the phone syncing to my itunes and during the syncing i has an update on facebook and out of habbit i immediately go to check it, so i cut off the syncing as this was going on. i dont think that would effect the phone now since i have gone thru a software update and a system restore since then.
as of writing this post i have been testing the phone with the case on and now the issue is not happening. i will be holding off on sending the phone and will continue to try and troubleshoot the issue, i now have a belief that it could actually be the otterbox that is doing this but i am not sure. i will try and keep this updated as i am telling both companies i have started this tread and that they should make reference of this in the notes