Keep the rice for dinner, not your phone
Oh no! You just dropped your phone in water! Or a common one coming up to summer, you jumping (or got pushed) into a pool with your phone in your pocket.
The first thing many people think of is to put it in rice. Now, it sounds like a good idea, the rice will absorb all the water and the phone will start working again.
It makes sense, and that is what rice does. But therein lies the problem.
Quite often it’s not the water that causes the problem, it’s what’s in the water. Water is full of minerals and other junk, that gets left behind when it's absorbed by the rice.
It’s what gets left behind that causes corrosion which in turn causes short circuits and stops your phone from working.
So what do you do when your phone goes for a swim?
The first thing you want to do is turn it off. Do NOT try to charge it or power it back on.
Unfortunately, you need to be prepared to replace the phone. Once a phone gets water inside it, it becomes very unreliable and there is no way to cost effectively guarantee the phone won’t have issues in the future, or if it's able to work at all again.
Will you lose your data?
There is unfortunately a high chance you will. Hopefully you have been backing up your phone. You can do this with cloud services like Google Drive, Drop Box, iCloud, or cold storage options such as physical hard drives.
We understand that not everyone knows how to efficiently back up their data, or it’s something we will “do tomorrow”. Please, have this blog post as your reminder to sort it out right now, or this week. You never know when it'll be 'to late'.
The course of action
After the water damage occurs, take it to a repair shop that is able to do microsoldering and data recovery as soon as possible. These repair shops have technicians that should be able to open your device and work on the logic board inside the device to recover those memories.
If your phone has recently gone for a dip, then reach out and drop your phone off or mail it in to one of our repair centres and let our team help recover those precious memories.
You can book your phone in for an assessment HERE or contact us HERE