[HD2 Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting and Genera] llofthou:
Nailing Jelly to a tree.

Recently I dropped my HD2 cracking the screen. I had made a clone of this phone JIC. BTW SPB Clone is a wonderful product especially if you are an enterprise dude supporting a bunch of identical WM devices. The clone was identical except it would not charge on the Powermat while my original phone worked OK. Initially, with the original phone, there was a problem with overheating but I fixed that with a third party, extra capacity battery. I've been working on this lovely issue for months. The extra connector in the battery compartment was for a car kit that charged the phone by replacing the back cover. Powermat took advantage of this feature and built a Powermat replacement cover. HTC had trouble with the car kit and dropped the product. Then, I assume, decided to continue making HD2s at some time with the car kit function disabled. (Yes, I did try enabling the car kit setup on the new phone with no luck.) Of course, no one at HTC has a bleeping clue except for that one exceedingly anal <explicative deleted> engineer who thought to disable the car kit charger on the phone. The model #'s on both phones are identical. However, the serial # for the one that charges starts with SH04XPR while the new HD2 that does not charge starts with SH07HPR. The 4XPR works and 7HPR does not.

Back to the damaged phone... OK, so I go on eBay and find a raft of digitizers for ~$30. Piece of cake to replace, hey. There was some confusion as to the connector so I decided to take apart the phone before buying the digitizer. HTC brilliantly decided to glue the digitizer to the LCD! Kill the <explicative deleted> engineer! I did get the LCD separated from the digitizer but cracked the LCD in the process. I am an engineer with 25 years in the field. I've done work on SMT devices, clean room stuff and I'm pretty handy. I wouldn't recommend trying to replace the digitizer. If the damn things were not glued together it would be rather simple. So, now with my original HD2 bricked or should I say hockey pucked, I had an opportunity to look into the mysterious difference between the two phones.

There is continuity from the power pin of the USB connector to the power pin of the car kit adapter. There is a jumper and a test pad near the USB connector on the power land. Without ripping the working phone apart I have to assume said anal engineer removed the jumper from the punch list. Why the... would anyone go though so much trouble and change the physical layout? You might ask... Is there anyway to fix this revision? Ummm, taking the HD2 apart is dicey because of the profuse application of glue to damn near everything. Just getting the case off is a nightmare. Then there are some really tiny connectors that are taped (did he say taped?) together you have to disconnect to get to the USB port. As much as I would love to be able to charge the phone on the Powermat I'm not going to try the repair. I don't know when the changed the manufacturing process but I'd say any serial # prior to SH04XPR should work. Anyone want to post charge vs. no charge related to serial # would help. BTW for all the gear heads out there I reverted the new phone to the identical BIOS as my old phone thinking it was a software mod but it is not. There is also some speculation as to myth of red vs. yellow reset buttons. Turns out they switched the reset buttons around the same time as the car kit mod but there is not a one to one correlation.

Finally I can attest to the fact that there is no continuity from the USB power pin and the car kit power pin on the new phone so we is... SOL on the Powermat thing... I think it was Shakespeare that wrote, "Kill all of the engineers." If you are wondering I'm a big fan of HTC and its HD2. I'm working on my third purchase. The only thing that sucks about the HD2 is Window$ but HTC did a wonderful job of hiding the OS.