Saving Your Water Soaked Phone

By Alika Salazar

If you own a mobile phone, chances are good that you either have or will drop your phone in a pool of water, like a swimming pool, bathtub or the dreaded toilet! Here are a few simple tips to take if you want to prevent getting soaked by your soaking wet phone.

• Turn your phone off right away. If you can’t turn it off, don’t try to force it. Call us right away and we’ll talk you through it.

• Put your phone in rice and bring it into our store as soon as possible. Rice will help pull moisture out, but it isn’t as effective as many people believe. We’ll open a phone that’s been in rice for two or more days and it will still have water in it, because it’s so tightly enclosed. Don’t leave your phone in rice for a week and hope it works.

• Don’t put it in rice for a few days and then plug it in. If you plug it in, you will most likely short out the components. We recommend getting it to us right away, while there’s still liquid in there.

• Don’t take your phone apart and try to dry it off. That is one of the most common mistakes people make. Bring it into the store as soon as possible and allow us to do a chemical cleaning on it. We have about a 75% recovery rate on water soaked phones. We usually need about two to 24 hours, depending on the severity of the damage.

So, what happens if you are one of those unfortunate folks that have a phone that cannot be restored? Is there a way to save your information? Yes! We can refer you to a company that specializes in extracting information from motherboards that are dead. You simply send it off to them and within a few days they will have an answer for you. More often than not, they can preserve your information and transfer it to your new phone.