Sorry to rehash what is most likely a dead thread, but I thought I would do so in the hopes that others out there who may still be suffering the pitfalls of HTC's terrible antenna design on the Incredible 2 might find this posting. I say this because today I found a dead-simple way to solve my phone's reception problem, and instantly boost its reception from an average of -103 dBm where I'm sitting right now to -77dBm. In other words, I found a fix that works, at least for my phone.
To cut right to the chase, if you remove the back cover of the Incredible 2 as I'm sure many folks with an Incredible 2 with bad reception have, you'll see two orange lines at the bottom of the backing that are actually the phone's antennae. These two antennae connect to the phone's receiver/transmitter via two gold-colored contacts at the bottom of the phone's body. These are easy to see once the back cover is removed. All I had to do to fix my phone was to take a narrow metal object (tweezers might work, I used the thinnest multi-tool I had on my leatherman) to push the 'loose' part of the two contacts (the one thats not attached to the phone) a few millimeters towards the direction of the camera. What this does is it folds the contacts up slightly (just a few millimeters), ensuring that they come into contact with the antenna on the back case. Somehow I guess mine had gotten pushed downwards over time, and as a result I effectively had a phone that did not have an antenna. When you do this, be careful not to push the contact too far and thereby squish it in an irreversible way, or worse, break it off entirely, in which case you would have to find another way to get the phone's transmitter/receiver contacts to touch the antenna contacts. Once done properly, my phone's reception instantly jumped back to as-new or better. As I said earlier, yesterday I couldn't place an outgoing call from the desk where I'm typing this from. My reception averaged -105, and often hit -120. Its currently reading -77.
My relationship with this phone over the past few months has been nothing short of excruciating. I assumed, as I'm sure many people have before me, that the contacts were touching the antenna as intended, and that the poor reception was the result of terrible antenna design (which in many ways it certainly is- putting an antenna integrated into the rear case opens the door to problems like this, but I digress). The confusing thing to me was that, when I first got the phone, I had no reception issues at all. But as time wore on, the phone's reception went from good/fine to utterly unacceptable. I would drop calls everywhere, regardless of whether I was indoors or outdoors. There were several business-related calls I took (they were spontaneous, as I learned to take important calls on landlines whenever possible) where I literally had to call the person back more than 3 times because my phone kept dropping the call. I did a job interview standing on my balcony while it was raining, because that was the only place it wouldn't drop a call, and even then it would echo and drop words. It was unacceptable by any standard, and I have no idea how I put up with it for this long. The funny thing is, I was literally planning on going to Verizon today to pickup a new phone to replace it, and did this as a last-ditch attempt to fix it after trying various aluminum-foil mods I had seen posted over the past year, none of which worked. So if you're an Incredible 2 user and you've also somehow managed to put up with such poor design for the past year or so, I hope this works for you as it did for me.
I also hope that, like me, you'll never buy an HTC phone again. After the last 6 months I've had with this Incredibly poorly designed phone, there is no way I will ever give HTC my money again. They didn't anticipate this problem arising in their product development (or worse, they pushed ahead despite it), and they NEVER came up with a solution for Incredible 2 users even after the problem came to light. To me, that says volumes about the type of company that HTC is, and how it treats its customers. The Incredible 2 was my first and last HTC phone.
