[haus]

Whenever you visit a forum like this you're going to get a skewed sense of the product because far more people will write to complain about something (generally trying to get it fixed) than will do so just to say "my touch pro is awesome and works great".

I got my TP secondhand from Ebay; it had been well used (and unlocked!), but it has been flawless in terms of hardware since the day I got it. It sits in my pocket without a case all the time.

I have to say (I honestly mean no disrespect here), if I see someone going through more than 2 or 3 Touch Pros, I raise my eyebrows a bit. Something ain't right. That level of hardware failure is a 10-sigma event. Granted, when you get refurbs, you're getting a phone someone else returned, and if Sprint/whomever doesn't check it for obvious hardware failure (or if the failure is intermittent and they don't catch it) then it's possible to get a string of truly bad phones. Maybe they just turn it on to see if the screen lights up and they don't open the keyboards. They should reflash them and go through a testing process, but we know the carriers don't care about the hardware as much as we all do. To them it's just a means to a subscription unit, and they are happy to keep handing them out until the subscription unit is happy.

The top hardware issues here seem to be the oil slick screen problem, or keyboard stops working (ribbon cable comes loose inside the phone), or (less common) separation of hardware pieces, be it the keyboard or the button panel below the screen. Most everything else is caused by software.