iPhone submerged in sink, but now all fixed ;).

joxang

joxang

joxang

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So...couple of days ago I side-swiped my iphone 4 into a sink full of water. Took it out almost immediately to try and turn it off, but even though the power button worked, the screen wouldn't recognise any swipes. So phone remained on and swathed in kitchen towels while I googled how to take the battery out and tried to find a small screwdriver, but eventually it turned itself off after about 10 minutes.

When I opened the casing the inside was liberally bathed in water and the phone was making a horribly alarming hissing and crackling noise. I took the battery out anyway, dried out the insides as well as I could, and put all the bits into a bowl of rice.

24 hours later everything seemed dry and after I'd taken bits of rice out of the ports and crevices, I put everything back together, and it turned on without a hitch!!

Two faults: it would not go out of headphone mode and it kept on restarting every 2 minutes. The first problem was due to rice congealed at the bottom of the port - needed to scrape it out with a tiny screwdriver and after a few blasts of compressed air and a restart it was ok. The constant restarting turned out to be a battery fault - I cleaned the contacts with ethyl alcohol a couple of hours ago and there hasn't yet been a restart. Ordered a spare battery anyway, but otherwise fingers crossed :)!

So lesson I guess is - don't panic if your iphone gets submerged. As long as you dry the internals out it should work again :cool:.
 
Wow, buy a lottery ticket while your luck's in.
Is there a sticker inside that changes colour when wet, I know Motorola did that a few years ago to void all warranty claims in similar circumstances.
 
Yep, there's one under the headphone socket, one above the dock connector, and two on the logic board. They go pink the moment they get touched by water - you could probably blag it if you had one or two pink but not four!

Also I honestly don't think it's luck. Like if your watercooling system spills all over your motherboard, and your computer shorts and shuts down, if you dry everything and clean all your components with alcohol then it should be fine. The component that's most at risk of damage in the phone is the battery and that can be replaced :).
 
Give it a few days and it will start to gain various random faults before failing completely.

Once it gets soaked there is nothing you can do.
 
Tricky said:
Wow, buy a lottery ticket while your luck's in.
Is there a sticker inside that changes colour when wet, I know Motorola did that a few years ago to void all warranty claims in similar circumstances.
Click to expand...

I think pretty much all smartphones have these now.

Can't say I blame the manufacturers for doing so really - I think they probably got fed up with people water-damaging phones then allowing them to dry and, when they still didn't work, claiming they'd just packed up of their own accord.
 
my mate dropped his iphone and ended up going to the apple store too see what they can do and as he was under warranty they advised for £120 plus his original iphone theyd give him a new one which isnt too bad if the water damage is quite severe
 
Didn't work for my iPod Classic, went through the wash, tried the rice trick and the play/pause button only does fast forward now, good excuse to buy a shiney new one.

My old iPhone 4, (TMobile unlocked one, I got off eBay) for some reason wouldn't do facetime or iMessage, I took it into Apple and explained the problem, the dude had a play with it and goes "Well what we'd like to do is replace this for you as it's under warrenty"

Brand New Shiney iPhone to replace a second hand one F T W!

Sometimes Apple are good for something
 
n111ck said:
Give it a few days and it will start to gain various random faults before failing completely.

Once it gets soaked there is nothing you can do.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. My dad dropped his BlackBerry down the khazi a few months ago. It stopped working for a day or two, but then started again and has been working perfectly ever since!
 
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n111ck said:
Give it a few days and it will start to gain various random faults before failing completely.

Once it gets soaked there is nothing you can do.
Click to expand...

My Desire went down my bog a few months back & was fine once dried out.

OP
How is that moment when you see your moby heading for a dunking. :eek: + :( + :p
Glad it worked out for ya.
 
You were very lucky.

My experience:-

iPod touch 2g dropped in my bath. I made the mistake of turning it back on when wet but after drying with rice I basically had a few lines on the screen, a blob or two on the screen. After a few weeks the headphone jack kept telling the logic board that headphones were plugged in, and then not, and would stop playing music web in docked mode. Had to open it and remove the headphone jack to stop it.

Blackberry curve got wet from a spilled drink in bag. All worked fine apart from keyboard ignoring all input. Blackberry would not repair because the little white squares were pink.

I'm sure it wouldn't be that tricky to make these devices at least water resistant to a few metres. I suppose if they did then they'd not sell so many.
 
whitecrook said:
Iphone hard off is hold power + home for about 10 secs
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Tried this but it just restarted.

As an update, Iphone is working perfectly, though I changed the battery to be on the safe side ;). I think cleaning the insides with alcohol was important, as I believe it's mostly dried residue that causes faults.

But just putting your phone into a bowl of rice won't work, it pretty much has to be taken apart.
 
For reference, how early was your iPhone 4 model?

From reading the Steve Jobs book apparently you're quite lucky, as it mentions that when he found out that some independent phone shops were doing iPhone 4 battery replacements/fixes he got miffed and changed the screws to non-commercially available screw heads so that people couldn't interfere....

kd
 
Wow, what an experience. I think I would have exploded if I did this, I'm only a month into an 18 month contract.

My mum did this about two months back, and it was never the same again. She went into the Apple Store, and they actually replaced it for free, because she wasn't trying to weasel her way out of it, she was ready to pay however much for a replacement. I think you're a tad luckier though!
 
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