My Cellphone My Terms

Don’t panic there is hope… well sort of.

I recently got caught in the rain on my motorcycle. I didn’t realize that my iPhone was in an outside pocket that didn’t have a waterproof liner. I rode home in the pouring rain for over an hour. When I finally got home the phone was still on and drenched. The phone was so wet there was water dripping from the bottom of the phone. I immediately turned the phone off and begun to dry it with a towel. I removed the SIM card and noticed that the water had gotten into the phone. I got out a blow dryer and begun to blow cool air into the phone from every opening. (Never use hot air as there are several sensitive areas that use a delicate adhesive that may loosen and cause more damage). I continued drying the iPhone for 2 hours, alternating the direction of the air from the top of the device to the bottom. I read on several blogs that putting the iPhone in a bowl of rice or silica gel packets will help to dry the phone. Many of them mentioned to leave the phone for a week. Seems like good advice, but I couldn’t live without my phone for a week. After another 1/2hr of blow drying I decided to put the SIM card back in and turn the phone on. To my amazement the phone worked! There was nothing wrong; well that’s what I thought.

Five months later I noticed that my iPhone was acting strange. It would intermittently loose the carrier and have a full signal, making calls was impossible. To make a call I would have to turn the phone off and back on again, to reset the device. This was the only way to make a call. Five minutes later the same thing would happen. I decide to call my wireless provider to see if there was something they could do, they were useless, so I decided to go to the Apple store. The first thing the guy behind the counter said was that there was water damage. They know this because internally there is a small piece of material that turns red when exposed to water. You can actually see the material if you look at the bottom of the phone with a small light. He then proceeded to tell me that they do not replace iPhones that have water damage. He explained that even if the phone worked perfectly after being exposed to water, the water that was trapped inside begins to rust affecting certain internal parts; this makes the phone do crazy things. He was surprised the iPhone lasted as long as it did.

However, there is a replacement warranty that costs $199 for a 16 GB.  They will take your old iPhone (damaged) and give you a new one. This beats paying full price for a new iPhone.

The lesson here is, if your iPhone gets wet, you may be able to save it. Try doing what I did as well as some of the other tips suggested. Have patience and keep in mind that if you don’t dry the phone 100% you may find the phone acting weird in a few months.

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