Little moisture got in touch screen, it has not recovered. I have too many claims on insurance, need to wait couple months, planning to get TP2 as soon as it's available.

Meanwhile, don't want to spend money on repair and wanted to try for a week or so work without touch screen

Turns out TP has very poor navigation with buttons. You can only make phone calls, launch comm manager, and that's about it, no soft keys, painful email navigation, no way to launch an app.

Does anyone know tricks to live without touch screen?

As you have already noticed, the TP is not very stong in the HW buton department. I would start by saying that altho I like it, TF3d will be utterly useless without a touch screen. I would shut it off and use Pocket Plus from SPB.t has a nice today screen app that can be navigated from the D pad and also has a buttons plugin that will allow you to map many more buttons to programs than winmo will alone.

The other option is a launcher that uses the touch sensitive dpad area (it is touch as well) to launch apps with a gesture (ie swipe left or right across the lower area of the phone. Its name eludes me right now, but I think it was an xda devs app called something like gesture launch?

My best suggestion (altho it will make you sound goofy) is MC Voice Command. Assign it to long press answer key and justg say "start live search" or whatever other program you would like.

A 4th option is another xda app that somehow uses the accelerometer to launch apps - not sure about this but it is another input method.

As stated above, I think the most viable option would be a combination of Pocket Plus and voice command - I use both of these now even with a functional screen. Hope this helps.

I don't know if this will help but here's a suggestion... My touch screen went out on another phone.. but I was able to dial and launch apps with Voice command. I could even play songs on the media player... Meanwhile back on my PC I was able to use MyMobiler to manipulate the screen from my PC.. That way I could backup my data and run other apps I needed. So if you connect to a PC with try that...
Mark

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Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.

Really appreciate the hints on voice command and launchers! I was not able to wait it out and rushed to service center thinking to pay $120 for touch screen replacement.

Turned out this was not moisture, rather these are metal things separating glass from plastic which got expanded. They said it'll be covered under manifacturers's warranty.

So I am going to get replacement tomorrow or so at no cost. This was a surprise to say the least.

Very nice. Enjoy your newish TP. Now you can try some of these new input methods because you want to and not because you have to.

Vsch, are you on Verizon? I have the same problem with what looks like a dark black blob under the screen when it is turned off. I took it to service at Verizon and they saw that I had Asurion and they wanted to pass it off as a claim to them instead of realizing that the phone had a manufacturer defect and was only 6 months old. I thought it should have been covered under manufactures warranty also like your problem. On their commercial, they show all the people that are suppose to be behind you when you pay the high price for Verizon, but when they get a chance, they just pass the buck off on some one else.

I am on Sprint. Normally once they see water indicator (little tape under cover) going red then they refuse to look at repair. It totally depends on rep. I was going to pay $120 to replace the screen because I ran out of number of incidents on Asurion and they said it's covered under manifacturer warranty. These devices never last a year for me because of very heavy usage. Either buttons die or power socket and now screen.