The digitizer (touchscreen) of my HTC Hero broke partially: Most of the time, the bottom row is very unresponsive, sometimes the entire touchscreen doesn’t respond and at other times the input’s just really weird, random and jumpy.

Now, since the phone is still under warranty (only 10 months old) I have a couple of options:

  1. Return my phone under warranty. If HTC’s local repair partner decides I dropped my phone one too many time or that there’s waterdamage, I pay nothing to have it recycled or I pay 50 euro for their conclusion and sending me back my Hero unrepaired or I pay about 140 euro for the repairs. If they judge me innocent, the repair’s free. Now, to be honest I did drop my phone a couple of times, but this defect didn’t occur after dropping it.
  2. Buy a new digitizer / broken Hero on eBay and install that myself. Costs me about 45 euro, might not actually fix the problem and the only guarantee I have is that the warranty will be voided.
  3. Buy a second hand HTC Hero. Costs me about 100-120 euro.
  4. Live with it.

Especially the uncertainty of the first option is slowing my decision down a lot… What would you do?

Posted by Ingmar Steen on Wed 22 September 2010 09:52