[HTC One X] knoxploration:
Realistically, the "small subset" thing is just PR-speke.

They've admitted to a hardware change. That's likely in the form of adding additional structure to prevent flex in the crucial area around the antenna connector; it'll be interesting when somebody gets a new one and opens it up to look what they've changed! Hopefully it's not a bodge to work around the problem. (And hopefully, repaired phones will get the identical change made in new production phones.)

Given the fact that a hardware change was required, that means *all* HTC One X international units before the date of the hardware change are affected. The only question is how long the problem will take to appear -- those who are rough with their phones, grip them tightly, or are just plain unlucky will get problems quickly. Those who treat them like gold dust will find it takes longer for the problems to occur, but they have the same design, so the problems *will* occur.

And that means really, it's not a "small subset". It's the entire production up to some unknown (but likely fairly recent) date. It will take a while for the community to figure out when the cutover was made, but that'll happen too, I'm sure.

I would also expect to see some way of telling whether your phone case uses the new or old design, based on the outside of the housing, the packaging, or through software (likely the former, though.) Without that, HTC has no way to prevent people sending back phones with the new design by mistake when they're really suffering router problems, etc. Their support team will need an easy way to tell the difference between new and old phones.

As for why HTC says the problem is a "small subset" when it isn't, the reasons are twofold. If the press repeats that message, the problem doesn't sound so bad to the buying public. Also, if they say that, then people won't immediately try and send in phones that haven't yet failed (but will eventually do so), meaning they can keep return times to a minimum without needing to increase their service department's staffing dramatically through the initial wave of returns. (And cynically speaking, they may be able to push some of the repairs from people who are gentle with their phones outside the warranty window.)

Now we have an admission of guilt, hopefully the focus of this thread can change to identifying the hardware change that's been made in new phones, identifying exactly where in the production run that this change was made, and identifying when the various HTC support departments around the world get the message and start accepting and processing repairs.

And I wouldn't expect to be getting new phones, people. Most likely, the change is to the polycarbonate back of the phone. That's the cheap bit, and the labor cost on the five minutes or less that it'll take experienced service staff to open your box, swap a phone's back panel, repackage it and process the paperwork will be far, far cheaper to HTC than the cost of replacing the entire phone. Hence, you can basically guarantee that other than for people who get in before the new parts become available, HTC will be swapping your phone's housing, not giving you a new phone. You'll likely get the bits that are part of the housing (antennas etc.) replaced because it'd be cheaper than the service tech swapping those over from your old phone back, but you probably won't get a new phone.