First world problem alert! But if I can fix this it will save me a lot of money on a new compoota phone.

I haz one of these:
http://www.htc.com/us/products/t-mobile-g2/

The four buttons at the bottom of the screen (home/menu/back/search) are no longer registering. No haptic feedback, no response. They light normally with the rest of the screen.

They are part of the same capacitive plate as the rest of the touchscreen, so I thought maybe it was a software problem. Found a few similar complainers who said they fixed with a master reset.

Tried that, no luck.

Problem did not begin after any particular thing got installed, and there was no physical even like a phone dropping or etc.

Any other ideas?

I have found that a lot of new smartphones can have issues when using an SD Card for storage...some apps will store certain program details on your card and once the card has been removed or formatted, the phone will work properly again. Try removing your SD card and seeing if the buttons work(maybe after a phone restart) and if so, there is a "Corrupted" bit of info on your SD...then you can just backup your SD contents on your computer, format the SD and try plugging it back into your phone.


--Dave Dyer, Rockland, Maine

thanks, just gave that a try. No luck.

By "master reset", do you mean that you wiped your data/cache, all that good stuff, or did you reflash from a Stock RUU?
Because if you did the former, you should try the latter.
If the latter doesn't work, I can't imagine how it could be a software problem, unfortunately.

By hard reset, I mean this (I'm running stock Android OS):
http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-1232

If it IS software related, and you do not carry insurance (cost of new phone replacement comment, and warranty is now invalid anyway) then you have nothing to loose by rooting it to see if replacing bojrked software is the issue.

http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/TMobile_G2:_Firmware_Downgrade_%28Gingerbread%29

Then CM7:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=956227

The only other thing I've seen so far to do with anything similar to your phone was that after a lot of use the buttons can get grimey contacts so it could need a cleaning?

not sure what the contacts are on that part of the phone... these four buttons are part of the touchscreen.

Could root and do CM7. That would get me at least a functioning OS since I could assign the back button to the physical keyboard. Right now I've got menu and search on the phys kbd and I mapped LauncherPro's home action to one of the quick keys. But there are a LOT of programs that are not usable without back button... they get stuck in settings screens or other app sections and the only way back to the front of the app is a reboot. Can't assign Back to a key without root, I hear. If anyone knows different, holler.

So I guess my current best workaround is CM7...

Is it possible that ONLY the bottom quarter inch of the digitizer is broken? Seems like such a weird thing to happen. Isn't it more likely that part but not all of a ribbon cable is bad?

Yes, it is possible that the digitizer is screwed. That's actually one of the more common issues of that phone. The digitizer craps out only in one corner or the entire bottom half goes out.