Random crash leaves me without a phone for the evening and more...

Question

I've had no major problems (just minor annoyances) with the iPhone, since buying it the day it was released, until last night. I went out to the bar and was showing off the phone to some friends (surfing the web and YouTube videos) when, with just my luck, the phone resets (not the typical crash to the home screen I’ve seen). After the phone reset and began to power back on the screen said "Please Connect to iTunes." I thought this was strange as I had a fully charged battery before going out and figured that I could probably just reset the phone again to get past this. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. At this point there was nothing I could do to get my phone working again as I'd lost ALL functionality of my device (except stylish paper weight). I thought this is just plain ridiculous as now I’m going to be stuck without a phone for the rest of the night hoping no emergency comes up where I’m going to need it (thankfully the rest of the night was to the most part uneventful). I’ve never had something like this happen, that is where I can’t use the device, to any of the previous half-dozen or so phones I’ve owned. But that was that and there was nothing I could do until I got home several hours later.
After finally arriving home I quickly connected the phone to iTunes which of course began the restore process. For the most part the process went fairly smooth but did take some time (about 10 minutes with all the verifying/restoring). During the process iTunes recognized my last backup, applied that to my phone, and reactivated the phone with AT&T. Everything was quite painless until finding out that iTunes doesn't quite back up everything which I've now found out and included a list of everything lost:
... Photos from my Camera Roll (this is the worst, lesson learned)
... Wi-Fi known networks and their passwords
... Mail account passwords
... Mail account messages (all messages had to be downloaded again)
... Calendar events that were recurring now appear twice
... All music/videos/photos had to be resynchronized
I'm still a little shocked that the phone can crash to this degree, at anytime, where you'll lose complete functionality of the device until you connect to iTunes. I mean come on what is not functioning properly that won’t allow me to restart/reset the phone? Good thing I wasn’t on Vacation or else I would’ve been totally screwed for the trip. Also, this was a lesson learned for me to backup my Camera Roll photos as I just never really thought about it before. Everything else lost was just an inconvenience in having to manually add passwords back, read/delete mail messages again, and delete duplicate recurring calendar events.
I just wanted to share my bad experience and hopefully Apple will continue to improve this device whereas it doesn't become completely useless for the evening. I still love my phone and this is by far the most trouble I’ve had with it.

Answer 1

Yeah, it would be nice if the backup contained a little more well backup. The Camera Roll photos should be synced or at least have an option to do so. Mail messages and passwords can't take up that much space and could easily be encrypted (again have an option to not back up if so desired). As for the duplicate calendar events I think it's just flaky with using Outlook to begin with.
...feedback has been left =)