Cell phones and moisture are, to put it in the nicest of terms, sworn mortal enemies. If you can't tell a story where you dropped your phone and it shattered to pieces, chances are you have one where you spilled, splashed, or trickled water on it, or dropped it in a puddle, sink, or pool... or best of all, a toilet.
Folklore and actual science have offered solutions to the problem of the wet cell phone over the last couple of decades, from toasting it gently in the oven to burying it in some rice to buying special drying environments for it. While we’ve had various amounts of success with these different methods, we decided to give them a real, semi-scientific trial run on a few different phones to see how they dealt with a serious immersion scenario.
A few caveats: we used four different phones, one for each drying environment we tested. Obviously, different body designs will take on water differently, but we submerged each one until all the air had appeared to escape from the interior. Likewise, different designs may dry out differently, and water may have an easier time clinging to some nooks and crannies.
Since a wet phone is a Defcon 1 situation in the context of device disasters, we didn't give the phones a specific time frame to dry out—if your phone is wet and you want it back, it’s in your best interest to give it as much time as you possibly can. We checked in on each phone after one day; those that were still wet were given an extra day. You can certainly dry them even longer.
Lastly, even if your phone appears to be working again after cooling its heels a while in a desert-dry place, that doesn’t mean water isn’t still in there working its long-term magic to corrode the various parts of the phone. Above all things, give it time, make sure it’s dry, and maybe never feel completely safe that there isn’t some lingering moisture intent on ruining your phones after a few weeks or months.
The four phones we soaked were a Samsung Galaxy Note II, a Pantech Breakout, a Motorola Razr M, and a HTC Hero. All the models varied in size, number of buttons, and openings, but all are touch-screen phones. The four drying methods used for each phone, respectively, were a specially designed product called a Bheestie Bag ($20), a container full of silica gel packets ($10-15 for the number we used), rice ($5), and air-drying as a sort of “control” method.
After soaking each phone, we removed it, shook out as much excess water as we could, dried it off, and removed the batteries if we could. If we couldn’t remove the battery and the phone was still on, we turned it off, and then placed it in its drying environment.
For the grand reveal: one day later, the Pantech Breakout in the silica gel packets and HTC Hero drying in air were working, but the Galaxy Note II in the Bheestie Bag and the Razr M in rice were still dead.
We gave the second two phones another day to see if they would come around. The next day, the Razr M initially booted up—to a screen with an Android bot lying down with an exclamation point popping Alien-style out of its stomach. All seemed lost, but as the phone laid on the table, it began its startup routine and animations all on its own. Suspicious, indeed, but we’ll let it slide.
The Galaxy Note II, however, never really came around. After we reseated its battery and charged it a while, trying to give it a hard reset got us to the screen when the phone offered to either boot or let us install a new ROM; it would not respond to button presses beyond that. We wouldn’t consider this a knock against the Bheestie Bag, as a phone of the Galaxy Note II’s generous size has room for a lot of water, and it’s not the easiest to drain out. A couple of days later, we tried drying out the phone in a 200-degree oven; lo and behold, it powered up and ran. Given the time-lapse, we can't fully attribute this success to the oven and, given the potential to ruin your phone, this should be a last-ditch effort. But if you're desperate, it's there.
As for the rice, silica gel packets, and even plain air, all returned the phones to at least a temporary working state. We wouldn’t call the phones rock-solid from that point on, but the methods can at least get them dry enough to extract any necessary data or one last backup. If we wanted to continue to use them, we’d probably give them much longer to dry, living in fear of that moment when things start to go just a little awry—an unresponsive volume button here, a suddenly dead battery there—when we’d know exactly what event and element to blame.
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