my pearl keeps freezing and the hourglass will spin for a couple minutes, the phone will act like it's restarting and the screen will come up for a few seconds then go black and it starts all over again.. what's wrong? will a hard reset fix the problem or cause more?

You can try a battery pull and see if that fixes it.

What were you doing just prior to this happening?

Did you drop the device? Did it get wet?

How much free memory do you have?