Evo acting weird

[random omen]

I, too, was having a few odd lag/reboot issues with my HTC Evo - both of them, actually. I eventually hard reset both of them and that cleared the issues up entirely and since then I've been golden. In the past some people have advised hard reseting a new device straight out of the box, and though that seems totally unnecessary, in my case it would have helped.

As far as backing up contacts/calendars, HTC Sync worked perfectly for me.