Soft and Hard Reset

Not sure if Apple uses these terms with any of their documentation, but an iPhone reset isn't really hard as in what I call an improper computer shutdown. An iPhone reset is more similar to a computer restart which doesn't affect any data or settings.

Soft = Turn phone off and on.
Hard = BOTH buttons held until you see Apple Logo.

Difference: I like to explain by thinking of a laptop. On a laptop (or even computer) you can go to hibernation mode (memory gets written to disk then powers down). When turned on, it loads back up from memory and thus everything that was loaded in memory before shutting down is put back. That is what a Soft reset is (when you do the power button the slide to turn off).
Thus if there was a memory leak for example in some program causing issues (sluggish, crashes, etc)....then if you just turn off and on, it will still have issues.
A hard reset is like pulling the plug on your computer. It will have to turn back on and reboot fully. It does write an error log out to itself (nothing you see) but causes no harm to your phone or data. It is just a way to do a full clean boot up. This actually fixes about 90% of the issues most people have.

Has no effect on battery outside of the fact it has to boot up thus processor and read writes will be happening.

Message was edited by: DaVBMan