My tiny, sleek iPhone popped out of my pocket and into my toilet. The toilet was empty and newly cleaned, but my heart jumped as I watched it splash into the bowl. I reached in with one hand, grabbed a hand towel with the other, and dried it for the next ten minutes. Oddly enough my phone continued to work. I thought I’d dodged a bullet, but less than thirty minutes later the phone showed no signs of life.
So I googled for ‘iPhone in the Toilet.’ From the search results there are clearly a lot of iPhone users who have had the misfortune of dropping their phone in the toilet. I don’t know why but I find this particularly amusing. Perhaps those little phones are too sleek for their own good. Perhaps, they need more traction to keep them in a back pants pocket.
Either way the sites I found suggested putting the iPhone aside to let it dry out for at least a few days. I plugged the phone into the charger and allowed it to sit overnight. Miraculously it started without error the very next morning. “Hooray,” I thought, I don’t have to buy a new iPhone.
But now the phone is intermittently turning off. It seems every time it falls into sleep mode it shuts itself off. So now I’m back to setting up an appointment at the Genius bar and explaining to the poor Apple employee that yes I dropped my iPhone in the toilet.
Aw geez, I hope it starts working normally soon. That’s actually one thing I’m totally paranoid about. I often forget that things are in my back pockets and when I’m washing my hands or cleaning the bathroom, and pens will fall out very close to the toilet. *yikes*
I shut it off for days. A friend of mine dropped his blackberry in a swimming pool, and it was little iffy , but then he shut if off for a couple days. It worked fine after that.
I’ve always wondered how that happens… I’ve seen a wide variety of poor phones that have had the misfortune of meeting the toilet water, and most don’t return to their old selves. (My job deals with a lot of phone sales, so I’ve seen phones with all kinds of abuse.)
The best advice is to take the phone fully apart, battery and sim card out (I assume the iPhone has one, since it’s AT&T?) and let it dry for a nice, long time. Then reassemble and cross your fingers, really. Otherwise you’ll need to get a new one, but water isn’t necessarily the end of a phone’s life.
My phone seems to be working a little better today than yesterday. It only shut itself off once, which I’m taking as a very good sign that it might just survive after all.
@ms. miniducky — the toilet had just been cleaned, but I will admit I cringed before reaching into the bowl!
@dong — I’ve considered turning off the phone for a few days, but I’ve grown so accustomed to using it that I can’t seem to be w/o it.
@foxie — this is the first time my cell phone has every fallen in. The iphone is really thin and slick. It just slipped right out of my pocket.
I read somewhere to put the phone in a thing of uncooked rice and let it sit. The rice is supposed to absorb the moisture from the phone. You could try that and see if it help, maybe there’s still some water in it.