My missus has a 3rd gen (i think) i phone, i like it a lot. Its never had any instability problems.
I had a cool ipod nano around a year ago, worked great for around 8 months. After it kept freezing and doing unusual shit. I'd do every kind of reset under the sun, software updates, the lot. ended up crushed in the vice in my shed, and I refused to fork out any of my earnings on an apple device again.
iTunes is f**king shit as well. Made my pc run like it was on valium... always with the bloody software updates. I kept letting it update, until one day i went and plugged in the nano (before the vice incident), and then it tells me the latest version of iTunes was too 'new' for my device, and wiped my library. f**k you apple. And to the not so literate PC user, go ahead with the updates and you'll end up with Safari, Bonjour and all sorts of other apple shit. I refuse to install iTunes on my new PC!