4 minute read
Dealing with wet cellphones
WET PHONE?
"WATER" DO WITH YOUR PHONE AFTER IT'S TAKEN A PLUNGE
BY ELLE LARSON
STEP 1. DON'T PANIC
Take your phone out of the water, take a deep breath and say a prayer. It will be OK!
STEP 2. TURN IT OFF
You want to eliminate any power going through you phone to avoid a short circuit. Don 't push any buttons and remove the battery if you can.
STEP 3. DON'T PUT IT IN RICE
Gazelle News studied 9 different wet smart phones and found rice dried significantly less water than plain old air.
STEP 4. LET IT SIT
Apple says to let your phone sit in a dry place for at least 5 hours and optimally 24 hours before turning it back on. The longer it sits, the better.
STEP 5. TURN IT ON
By now, your phone should be OK. Check if everything works properly. If it doesn 't, you can buy a new one!
REFERENCES
About splash, water, and dust resistance of iPhone 7 and later.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207043
How to fix a water damaged phone
https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-fix-water-damaged-phone647461/
Gazelle’s Guide to Water Damage: The Truth About Rice, the Galaxy and Everything.
https://www.gazelle.com/thehorn/2014/05/06/gazelles-guide-waterdamage-truth-rice-galaxy-everything/
The wet phone conundrum
BY ELLE LARSON
Gazelle News gave nine different smartphones a bath in some water and then used different popular methods for drying them out and discovered plain old air worked best.
They put five Samsung Galaxy S IIIs, three iPhone 4s and one iPhone 3GS in cat litter, a flour pasta called couscous, classic rolled oatmeal, instant oatmeal, instant rice, silica gel and uncooked rice respectively for 24 hours.
The website states the phones that were put in rice fared the worst out of all the methods, and the phone they left in the open air dried faster than any of the phones placed in drying agents.
The experiment concludes, “Don’t waste your time with conventional white rice. And if you don’t have silica gel or instant rice, don’t worry. Leaving your phone in open air, (perhaps with a fan for better air circulation) works just as well.”
Britni Hull, a marine biology junior from California, said her first semester at BYU–Hawaii, she accidentally dropped her iPhone SE in the toilet when, “Bloop! It fell out,” from her pants pocket.
From there, she said she put it in a bag of oatmeal for 24 hours to dry it out. “Most people say stick it in rice, but I had a friend that said, ‘That’s stupid. That won’t help. Use oatmeal instead,’” she recounted. She said after a day, her phone had dried and worked properly.
After a swimming trip to Mokoli’i island, however, the phone was not so lucky, Hull said. She said she placed the phone in two plastic bags and a pull-string backpack and took it for a swim. This reinforcement, she lamented, did little to stop the water from seeping into the device.
As she returned from the island, she said the phone was soaked. She put it in oatmeal for three days, and then “it went dead and it never turned on again.”
As students make the trip to Chinaman’s Hat at Kualoa Beach Park, swim around Hukilau Beach or jump off the rock at Waimea Bay, Hull said it’s helpful to know how to resuscitate their phones from a watery death.
Edgar Cervantes, from the Android Authority website, says to save a wet phone, people should take it immediately out of the water and turn it off. Avoid pressing any keys or moving the device around, Cervantes continues, because the more places in the phone the water reaches, the higher the chance the phone
The wet phone conundrum
gets damaged. He also recommends taking out the battery or any other part of the phone that is meant to be removed.
Apple’s support website says for Apple products, people should try draining water from the charging port, dry off any water on the outside of the phone, and then let it sit in a dry place for at least five hours. The website recommends people to leave the SIM tray closed and avoid charging the phone until it is dry.
After a few days of drying, Cervantes says, plug the phone into a charger and try to turn it on. Check to see if everything works, and if it doesn’t, “Not to sound like a doctor, but after this point we have really done everything we could. Sometimes you just have to let the phone go,” he writes.
Hull said it was about a week before she got a replacement phone in the mail from her parents. She admitted that week was “pretty rough.” She said it was difficult for her to contact people, make plans and even wake up. Not having an alarm clock was tricky, she explained. She said she would just pray the night before that she would wake up on time for class and work. •
After doing its own tests on various cellphones to figure out how to dry out a wet phone in the best way, the website Gazelle News says letting them air dry is the best method. Photo from Unsplash by Bannon Morrissy.
