Palm Pre won't load apps (messaging, memos, contacts, email)

Question

I have been having issues with my phone and can find no root cause.  As it exists right now, the phone is unusable - i lose/miss messages, am unable to read email and tear through battery.  The surprising thing is that these issues are apparently not hardware related as I have now seen them on 2 devices.  Please let me know what I can try / how to resolve this.  Below is a detailed description of my problem and what i have tried.  (tl;dr - i have completely reflashed one device, and just recieved a 'new' one from sprint today that still has these issues).
I first noticed problems with my phone approx 2 weeks ago when trying to open the 'messaging' app to read/send text messages.  the app icon would flash once or twice, but the card did not appear.  Sometimes it came back with a reboot.  After noticing this, I also found that the 'Memos' app would start, but not display any stickies (even the 'new memo' one).  Contacts and Email load, but just display a blank canvas (white screen - the add contact/new email button appears though).  The calendar also loaded the week view, but would not respond to requests to change to day or month view, and showed no events.  Along with contacts not loading, I had issues getting Universal search to display contacts stored on my phone.  During times when these apps didn't work, the back of the phone got hot, and battery life dropped horribly (from lasting more than 12 hours on a full charge to 4 hours).  These issues led me to believe that maybe there was a hardware problem.  it seemed like any app that used data storec on the device was having issues - maybe the internal flash went bad or had solder issues.  I took it into my local sprint store, and they restored / hard reset it - I'm assuming this is the same as the webOSdoctor flashing - it took about an hour.  things worked fine for part of the day after getting it back, but eventually came back.  I took the phone back to sprint and they requested a new one under warranty.
I just got the new one today, and after logging into my palm profile, re-downloading a few apps, and sycing my contacts with facebook, palm profile, and google, the issue returned.  it's hard to say for sure, but it seems like maybe it was related to the facebook sync?  that was the last thing I started before walking away.  when I came back, I could not open messaging, and the other issues mentioned above all appeared.  I tried putting the phone in airplane mode thinking that my wifi or 3g connection was wonky  (Sprint is currently having a lot of problems in my area - West Michigan), but this had no effect either.  When I took the phone out of airplane mode, things seemed to work for about 10 minutes, but then the issues resumed.
Has anyone seen or heard of things like this?  my best theory is facebook issues, but I am not about to start deleting friends one by one to find the problem.  I only have about 260 facebook 'friends', but that syncing is one of the most important features of this phone to me.  At this point, I am at a loss for things to try.  perhpas there are developer tools I could use to see running processes / debug messages / errors?  I rooted my first palm pre ( replaced 9 months ago after cracking the screen ), but am not interested in doing that to this device for fear that sprint / palm would claim it voided the warranty.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Post relates to: Pre p100eww (Sprint)

Answer 1

Hello!
First of all rooting your device does not void warranty for anything wrong done there can be resolved through the use of webOS doctor, with exception to overclocking.
Could you try to partial erase the device and instead of signing back into your same palm profile, make a new one.  Add back your online accounts and see how the phone fairs.  At this time any homebrew install will complicate matters so if some installed please run the webOS doctor instead of erasing the device.  Keep me posted.