iPhone crashing - many miles from my itunes

cantdecide

I have an iphone 3GS that I got almost two years ago. I brought it on my trip to New Zealand with a basic brief that favoured reliability. Knowing I'd be on the road, I left my laptop in Ireland.

For the last few days, lots of it's functions have been crashing. Safari tries to open and crashes after a second. The ipod worked for a while and now crashes in the same way. It won't access the istore without crashing now. Maps is hit and miss. It receives emails but once you try to open one, it crashes now.

I've recently replaced the camera. Before that, I had to replace the silence button. The last time it was in the shop, there was talk about it being flashed but that meant it wouldn't unlocked any more, which is obviously no good since I fundamentally need the phone as a travel companion. I've tried resetting it holding the home/ power button it did nothing to help. I synced it with itunes and updated it three weeks before I left.

I know the usual is going to be the case. Wipe it, flash it etc etc. but what do I do then? I have access to a friend's itunes but that means I lose all my recent trip photos, texts, contacts, music, everything, right? Is this just a sign of things to come? Is it going to be one thing after another from now on?

Is there any way that if I ask a repair shop to look at the phone, they can back everything up for me? I really don't want to lose all my stuff. Is sending for my laptop with my itunes the best solution at this stage?

cantdecide

For the record, what I did was went to Settings>General>Reset>Reset all settings

It gives you a message saying that no data or media will be lost. It don't lie. The iphone's run like a champ since with only minimal annoyance tweeking general settings again. Happy days.