[AT&T, Rogers, Bell, Telus Samsung Galaxy S III] tjtenor4:
Hi all,

So here's the deal. I'm kind of at my wits' end right now.

My wife has a bone stock I747 from AT&T (other than being factory unlocked and now being used on T-Mobile). It was purchased (new, in an AT&T store) in late December 2012.

Just yesterday, the phone started acting strangely: she'd try to take a picture, and it wouldn't save. Sometimes the camera app would inexplicably close. Then she realized she couldn't load the images gallery - the gallery app just closes and reverts to the home screen. And then other apps just started randomly closing in the same manner.

What I mean by the latter is, for example, you'll be in gmail, composing an email and typing away, then all of a sudden the screen simply reverts to the home screen - as if the app has been killed in the background by an invisible task killer. (If you re-open the app, it starts as if fresh - it does not return to where you left off.) This happens in multiple applications, not just ones related to pictures.

Another way in which this problem has manifested itself includes apps taking an inexplicably long time to update from the Google Play store.

So I am now concerned that the internal storage is corrupted. She didn't previously have an SD card in there (she has the 16 GB model, and before I started messing with it last night / today / tonight, ~1.5 GB were still free). Tonight, I put a 32 GB microSD card in, set the camera to save to it (instead of the internal storage), and took a few pictures. They all saved perfectly fine to the SD card.

Steps I've taken:

-cleared the cache for a bunch of apps (gallery, instagram, google+ [her phone is set to auto-backup all photos to google+], facebook, basically anything that remotely has to do with pictures)

-cleared the cache partition in recovery mode

-cleared data for gallery (in addition to cache)

Clearing the caches has resulted in the free space on the phone increasing to ~2.80 GB. However, none of these steps has solved the problem.

I also plugged the phone into a computer (connected as MTP) and attempted to copy or move her pictures from the internal storage "camera" folder to the microSD card's "camera" folder. However, when I try to open the "camera" folder via the computer, it cranks for a while, and then says "0 items." From that point on, the computer can't see ANY folders on the phone - it requires unplugging the phone and resetting the phone to see the folders again. (Though of course this is semi-pointless, because as soon as you open a folder, it says there are 0 items in it, as above, and the cycle starts anew.)

Anyway, I'm sorry if some of this is a little rambling or incoherent - it's almost 4am here and I've been trying to fix this phone for the past 3 hours (after spending approximately the same amount of time on it last night). Basically, I guess my question is: is my fear that the internal storage is corrupted likely accurate? If so, so be it - I guess at that point, we send the phone back to Samsung for warranty service?

However, if there's a chance that these issues are being caused by something else, I'm willing to try other steps to try to fix the phone.

Thanks in advance...