Q: Through a complete fluke, my iPhone 7 ended up falling into a bowl of soup! I pulled it out immediately and tried to dry it off, but it’s dead. What can I do? I can’t afford to buy a new phone!
A: Unfortunately, Apple’s a bit late to the party with its water resistant smartphones: The iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X are all able to survive being dropped in a bowl of water, but your iPhone 7 wasn’t designed for that. Which doesn’t help you a bit, I know.
The general approach for when you have a wet device is to dry it off as soon as you can, disassembling it as best you can too. Then be patient; you don’t need to try and power it up 60 seconds later. In fact, a good strategy is to disassemble it and let it sit untouched in a sunny window or similar for at least 24 hours.
“What about a bowl of rice?” I can hear you ask. We’ve done that too. The idea is that rice is a desiccant, something that extracts moisture from its environment because it’s so dry. People definitely toss a wet device into bowls of [uncooked!] rice – or sealed bags with rice – all the time and it might work. But there’s a problem: rice dust.
Not only are smart devices kinda dumb when it comes to water, but very few of them are also dust proof, which means you might be trading one problem for another. When we put my daughter’s iPhone 6 in a bag of rice to try drying it, we ended up with a rice kernel wedged in the lightning port!
If you want to go the desiccant route, you might instead want to consider popping by the hardware store and getting a handful of silica gel packets. They’re the little “do not eat” packets in lots of products we purchase at the market too. They’re super cheap and offer more drying capability without any danger of dust getting in the way.
There are also commercial solutions to fixing your phone. Staples has a device made by Tekdry that’s designed for just this purpose. They’ll put your phone in, turn it on and 30 minutes later it’s either fixed (and you pay the fee) or it’s still dead, alas, and there’s no charge.
With my daughter’s iPhone 6, however, we went a different route and took it to UBreakIfix, a franchise electronics repair store that disassembled it and diagnosed the problem within a few hours, then had it fixed and ready to pick up the next morning. In her case it involved replacing the entire screen, but that only cost us $119, quite a bit less than replacing the phone at AT&T or through the Apple Store!
Once you get it fixed – hopefully! – you might consider investing in a really good waterproof case from Lifeproof or similar. Lifeproof’s based in Fort Collins too, so you’re keeping it Colorado native at the same time.
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Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since before the creation of the Internet and runs the popularAsk Dave Taylor — http://www.askdavetaylor.com/ — tech review and how-to site. You can also find him on Twitter as @DaveTaylor.
