[Nexus One General] R0bbit:
Hello, I'm Demon_man's friend, decided to make an account here to put in my story and answer a few questions.

I had upgraded my phone to 2.2 with the firmware that was signed by Google and on their servers for those few days, so I didn't need to root my phone for it, and after talking to Google, they were cool with it. On Friday, June 11 I was driving around in my car with my phone sitting on the passenger seat plugged into my car stereo via the 3.5mm jack. When I grabbed my phone I noticed the trackball was glowing red, didn't see any notifications so I turned my phone off and back on. The first thing that tipped me off to a problem was that the trackball would glow red the instant I turned the phone on. Once booted up the trackball was unresponsive. I plugged it in to charge while I slept, charged just fine. The next day I tried to connect it to my computer (WinXP) over USB multiple times, with resets on the computer and the phone each time, and it would never recognize that it was connected on the phone and when unplugged Windows would inform me of a problem with the USB device.

On Saturday and Sunday I was able to use the phone with no more problems going on, so I didn't really think anything of it. On Monday, the phone was unusable because the trackball decided to have a mind of it's own and just select stuff at random so I had to fall back on my old iPhone 2G.

Tuesday I tried to call Google's CS, but was unable to get through because their automated system didn't want to take my IMEI number the multiple times I tried to enter it in so I had to call HTC's CS. After talking to the guy there he transfered me over to Google, but he decided to tell them water damage. After getting that cleared up the Google rep agreed that is was a hardware problem and transfered me back to HTC to set up a device swap.

Got the new phone the next day (Wednesday) got that phone setup to make sure everything was working proper. On Thursday I turned on the broken phone to do the factory reset and sent it on its way to the HTC repair center in Texas. It got there on Friday and they looked at it on Monday. Got an email saying they looked at it and I should log into HTC's service site to review the results. The only thing that told me was that they wanted to charge me $283 with no reason why. I called up HTC CS to get told that they replaced the mainboard and the screen. I asked why the screen was replaced when there were no scratches on it and it worked just fine when I sent it out on Thursday. He didn't have any further information and that someone would get back to me in 24-48 hours. I gave them 24 hours, called back and ended up talking to the same guy I talked to before. He informed me that he didn't have any further information and his supervisor would need to talk to the repair center's supervisor who would then talk to the tech who worked on my phone. Then the tech would talk to his supervisor who would talk to the other supervisor would would then get back to me.

That's completely unacceptable to me, so I tried calling HTC's North American HQ and talked with a Jim Black, Product Support Manager for North America. He called the repair center then called me back saying they told him there was water damage and they would send me pictures within 24 hours.

I told him that water damage would have been impossible because the phone was sitting on the seat of my car at the time things started going wrong, it never has seen a drop of water and I never use it in the rain, so I guess the leather they used somehow turned into water. When I told him that the hardware costs of the phone were a bit under $175, $100 cheaper then what they wanted to charge me his answer was "You wish". It's also worth pointing out that both of the water indicators you can see were both solid white, no red or pink tint at all when I sent it out.

So that's where I'm sitting at now.

(Wow, that was a bit long, sorry about that)

@slowz3r and agentkalaw:

When I get the pictures hopefully I'll be able to verify the IMEI number on the phone to what I have on record.

@britoso:

Generally there is one on the battery and one under the battery on the phone they you can see. There also may be a few inside the case you can't see on some devices.

@SiL3nTKiLL:

Funny thing is I was telling people after I called HTC and Google on Tuesday that I figured they would try to screw me over and claim water damage. I bet I even posted it on Twitter.

@irishrally:

I did call up Google a few hours ago, apparently because it's a hardware problem their hands are tied and it's just me and HTC fighting it out.