They use a low quality button to turn off/on the device. And this button is pretty much necessary to wake up the phone. Especially in the case of a touchscreen device.

This button is unlikely to survive harsh usage and is probably going to die in a matter of months.

I remember a friend’s HTC phone (powered by Windows Mobile!) suffering a similar fate. The HTC guys took around 800 rupees to temporarily fix it. And they warned that the internals are damaged so much that care has to be taken while using the button. And if it goes bad again, a major hardware change would be required that would be pretty costly.

I guess I would probably end up having a similar problem with the Nexus One sometime next year. There are possible ways to fix it… The function to wake up the phone can be assigned to the joystick trackball (which I do not use anyways). But there are no official ways. No software configuration is available.

There are some third party apps which are very erratic in nature. I am not alone searching for a solution incidentally. It would be good if Google can incorporate such a configurable setting in the Android platform itself. Or HTC might launch an official app that does it for their devices.