Just in case it wasn’t clear, once you’ve turned it on there’s no going back. If it’s fried, it’s permanently fried.
Get a cell phone built to military specifications, or something similar. It seems the Samsung Rugby which I have is no longer available, but others are.
No, it wasn’t clear. I turned it on after plugging it in, and it displayed “download in progress.”
That’s toast?
Oh, and an update, I couldn’t get this thing apart. I got 8 screws out, but I couldn’t figure out how it snapped together, so instead of breaking the phone I took a break.
Is it worth trying the water/ Alcohol method anyway?
How hard/expensive would it be to just get a replacement phone?
I had some trouble figuring out how to take mine apart too, I think I had to pry some things off with a screwdriver and knife.
The point is to try to wash out as much of the water and soap as possible, so if you can’t get it apart, try soaking it, then shaking it out, soaking and shaking. Anything you can think of to remove the soap, salts and detergent. Don’t let it dry out until you are done. Dried soap residue on the components would be much more difficult to get out especially if you can’t open it up.
Same with the alcohol…the alcohol is meant to get rid of the residual water. Without the phone being apart, the water will just stay in there. The alcohol will penetrate a little better than water, but again whatever you can think of to get the water inside to mix with and get rinsed out with the alcohol would be a plus. Then the last step of drying is just to evaporate out the residual alcohol.
Should you go ahead and do this treatment? Sure, why not? what have you got to lose if your phone is already ruined. It will cost you some time and the buck fifty for the alcohol. I did it for the entertainment of taking my phone apart and seeing if it would work. I I thought mine was trashed, so I did it as a science experiment to learn something. The fact that it seemed to work was a plus. On the plus side if it works for you, you’ve got a great story to tell and you can be a hero to the next person who washes their phone.
DO IT!!! low cost risk with a chance of a high pay-off!
My daughter dropped her phone in the toilet and a day in a bowl of dry rice saved it. Be sure to remove the battery and open up any keyboards, etc. (She forgot to slide out the keyboard originally, so it still didn’t work when she came home from school. She opened it up and put it back into the rice overnight. Worked just fine in the morning.)
I just accidentally washed my cheap Motorola TracFone. Since a replacement is only $10, I didn’t bother to do much to try to save it. But after about a week, I charged it and it is working fine.
Hey guys, 
just wanted to ask if you know how to fix a phone, if you accidentally left it in your pocket when you’re doing laundry and it gets wet? I put it in a bag of rice and bread and it still won’t turn on. All it does is hiss out of the speaker an has some water still inside the screen. Please help! You can pm me on Facebook @ Linsay Leann Chitwood .:smack:
Patience, Bunny 55. Don’t try to turn it on until it’s perfectly dry. If it still has water in the screen, it’s not perfectly dry.
For what it’s worth, I ran a digital camera through the wash a few years ago. Four days ago, my wife dropped her phone in the snow and it stayed there until enough snow melted around it to reveal the phone. We “field stripped” both devices by removing the batteries and data cards and opened all the access doors that didn’t require tools. Then we put them in dry rice near a forced hot air heater vent for a full day. When there was no sign of moisture, we charged them and plugged them back in. Both worked fine. No extra rinsing necessary in our cases, though I suppose the alcohol rinse above probably would have helped get rid of a lot of residual moisture and speeded up the drying process.
This. You are lucky it wasn’t a brick.
You might be screwed if its been turned on while wet. Turn it off and keep it off until you have removed as much salts, soap and water (and alcohol) as possible.
I think the rice trick has been successful, but the key is limit any electrical energy going through it when wet; and remove all the soap residue and liquid before you turn it on. If that doesn’t work, you’ll probably need a new phone…but it was a fun experiment wasn’t it?
First of all, unless you live in a particularly humid area, rice does nothing. A container full of rice will act as a mild desiccant, but it’s not going to draw the water out of the phone like some kind of voodoo magic. The water will evaporate out of the phone with or without the rice.
Unlike a lot of silly stuff on the internet though, at least the rice won’t cause any harm.
Second, if your phone gets wet, immediately take out the battery and let the phone completely dry out. You can put it in a can full of rice, but in reality, unless you live in a very humid area, leaving the phone on your counter and doing nothing will allow it to dry out just as well. Do not put the battery back in and turn on the phone until the phone is completely dry. Some phones are designed so that you can’t take out the battery, which kinda screws you there.
The phone might recover, or it might not. If it does recover, and you put it in rice, you can tell everyone that the rice fixed it (even though it had nothing to do with it), just like everyone else on the internet.
My phone went through the laundry a few years ago. Baking it at 140 degrees for 12 hours fixed it. Being hot accelerates the drying process.
It worked for my daughter
It won’t hurt the washing machine.
Note that much of this advise was given back when virtually all cell phones had removable batteries. That’s much less common these days. A phone without a removable battery will have some circuits powered even when “off.” I’m not sure how much I’d want to rinse such a phone out…although if the alternative is throwing it away, I suppose it won’t cause much more trouble to try.
(Many phones with a removable battery will also be active - there is often a coin cell or a supercap that maintains a real time clock, to the phone has a trusted time. This lets you validate certificates for DRM and WiFi.)
It isn’t necessarily true that turning the phone on while still wet means it’s a goner. It’s certainly more likely to cause problems, but there are failure modes that are non-destructive. For instance, a short on a connector may indicate a special flashing cable, causing the phone to go into a download mode such as the four year old OP. If that dries up cleanly and is no longer shorted, then the phone would boot from flash instead, and possibly work.
My wife put her Blackberry through the washing machine years ago. After a long, slow dry in sunlight for 2 weeks it worked just fine.
The rice trick worked on Tom Scud’s phone a couple of years ago, but it didn’t go through the whole wash cycle, just 10 minutes or so. But it’s certainly worth a try. Take out the battery first.
If you have any of those silica packets that come with some electronics and cameras - heat them in an oven at LOW heat for an hour, then put them in a sealed Ziploc baggie with the phone. The stuff is specifically designed to pull water out of the air, to keep things dry. Heat “recharges” them.
I dropped my Hello Sarah in the washing machine one time. The ringer crushed it to bits.