IPod touch random crashing

Question

I just upgraded from a 3G 40GB iPod to a brand spankin' new 16Gb iPod touch, and I'm noticing some random weirdness with it. First a few details:
*- At this moment I have 969 songs, 1 video, and 4 photos loaded on my iPod touch, leaving 3.9GB free.*
*- I bought the iPod last Sunday, and it came loaded with firmware 1.1.1.*
*- This morning I updated the iPod to firmware 1.1.2 with no issues.*
Here's what I've noticed so far:
a) If you create a new playlist directly on the ipod itself (using the On The Go list), it sometimes randomly crashes and resets back to the home screen. I'll be sorting the music list by artist name, and it usually happens when I tap on their name, followed by the name of the album/CD. One time when this happened I noticed that the name of a song was "blinking" (best way I can describe it). The text was "blinking" left and right, followed by the ipod resetting itself back to the home screen.
b) I've noticed that after a while, tracks that were were encoded directly from a CD with Apple Lossless Compression lose the ability to seek using the seek bar (tap once on the screen while a song is playing to display it). The pointer on the bar will move to the desired location, but the song keeps playing at it's present location. Tapping the last track/next track arrows doesn't do anything either (you'd need to tap them twice). Doing a reset by holding down the power button on the top of the player and sliding the slider fixes it for a short while. I haven't tried this yet with the 1.1.2 firmware installed, so I don't know if this particular bug has been squashed.
c) I've had it crash once while selecting a song from the artists playlist. Hasn't happened again yet since updating to 1.1.2.
d) I have had random crashes using the youTube feature. I haven't tried it yet with firmware 1.1.2 though, so I do not know if this bug has been fixed yet either.
Overall I like the iPod touch. I like the features it has and it's a nice replacement to my dead 3G iPod. What I'm not liking is now unrefined the firmware seems to be. Everything I'm seeing points to a firmware problem Vs. a hardware problem.
I would greatly appreciate it if someone from Apple's ipod dev team would look into the issue. I do not want or need a personalized reply; rather think of this posting as a bug report. I have been allowing iTunes to send crash reports, but I have no way of knowing if this exact error is being reported.

Answer 1

Well, on my way home today I was using my iPod in my car (I have it directly connected to my stereo system using a Belkin Auto Kit (which, by the way works fine with the iPod Touch)), and I noticed something else.
Initially I thought the issue with the seek bar not working was limited to songs I had ripped from CD's in my collection using ALC compression. It looks like it's also affecting songs I have downloaded from the iTunes store too.
I tapped the rewind button (the "|<<" button), and it wouldn't rewind the song back to the beginning. So I tapped it again, and it went to the previous song. I happened to be pulling into my driveway so I stopped the car, picked up the iPod and started playing with it. Sure enough the problem came back. I tried seeking using the slider. No go. the "|<<" and ">>|" buttons weren't working right again either.
I unplugged the iPod from the auto adapter and gave it another go. Same issue.
That was about 2 hours ago. I just tried using the iPod a few minutes ago and it's still doing it.
I just did a soft reset a moment ago by holding down the power button and then powering down the iPod. It's working fine again.
In four years I think the most I ever reset my older 3G 40GB iPod was around 8 to 10 times TOPS. I'm well past that with the iPod touch, and I haven't owned it for more than a week.
I think Safari has crashed on me once or twice, but to be honest I cut that app a lot of slack. There's a lot of badly designed web sites out there that have even crashed & locked up my Palm Treo 700WX phone to the point I needed to do a reset on it. I'm being a bit more critical over the issues I'm finding because they're part of the basic functionality of the device.
Simply put, the issues I'm experiencing are small and annoying, but they should have been caught before release. Granted things sometimes slip through the cracks, but if you consider just how visible the issue is, it's even more surprising that it wasn't caught in testing (hopefully it was tested before release?......).