HTC - possibly the greatest tech company in the world?

It's not often I post about a specific company, and it's even less often that I would praise a company but today I would like to say the following. HTC are absolutely, unbelievably brilliant. I own a Google Nexus One which I have hacked, rooted and generally played about with. The thing is, in order to do this you need to unlock the bootloader of the phone, and when you do this, you are presented with following screen.

Note the words "unlocking the bootloader will void any warranty on your phone".
Anyhow, the power button, which is also the wake button, on my baby started to play up. Having done a little bit of research, it seems that this is a design hardware issue on phones built before April 2010. Essentially the button has a dodgy ribbon attached. It wasn't long before the button didn't work at all.

I was able to mitigate this by putting a custom rom on the phone that allowed the trackball to wake it, but I still had the problem that if, for some reason the phone turned off I was going to have Hell getting it back on again. So I phone HTC Europe to get it fixed.

Now clearly, I have bnroken the warranty on this phone, so I was fully prepared for the "oh you're warranty is void you're going to have to pay". I was completely upfront with the service centre telling them I had voided the warranty by unlocking the bootlader, but I made clear that i would flash the phone with a standard non-root Rom before sending it back.

The call centre said that even if I did this I would still have to pay for the repair and I would be contacted before it was carried out to say how much it would cost. Fair enough I thought, I accept that I voided the warranty, so be it, I love the phone enough to spend money on it.

So UPS come and pick it up last Monday, I track the phone via HTC's website into the repair centre, I hear nothing so I call them eventually, and get told it's being tested and I will receive an email about charges. I wait a few more days until this morning, and I get no email, so I call them again to be told the phone is with UPS and is on its way back to me and am given a tracking number. No charge, fixed under warranty.

Now you might think I was just lucky, but having looked about online a bit more, it seems that HTC have done this a number of times for many people. A company that honours the warranty for a hardware issue when technically they were totally within their rights to charge me is a company worth dealing with I say.

HTC, you rock.