One major design flaw in the iPhone immediately becomes clear when you’re frantically trying to shut the thing off but the screen backlight doesn’t work and what you can see of the screen is flickering. On any other phone you would just pop the battery out, but not this one. I did eventually get the phone to power down, which was probably a good thing since it was starting to getting pretty hot, probably from the battery shorting out or something.

Also on a regular phone, you could take the thing apart and dry it out thoroughly, but that too is a problem with the iPhone. If you’ve seen the video on youtube where they just sort of pop the back off the phone let me reassure you that this is not the case. Even with the entire edge of the phone display separated, my phone case did not want to come apart, so I’ve got the nice scratches near the bottom. In fact, I gave up after it became apparent that the cover was trying to take some pieces with it. I settled for having just the sim card cover off and case edges separated somewhat.

Now that I’ve trashed them, I’ll have to give the iPhone designers (or perhaps the Chinese company that actually builds it) some credit, becasue my phone survived this situation.

After a lengthy hair drier session (I found the “cool” setting to be quite useful) and a day spent in a soft bed of rice, this story has a happy ending. Once the condensation cleared up from the camera lens I decided it was probably safe to power the phone back up again. Sure enough, it is now working fine again, but I’m not too sure about the battery capacity – it seems perhaps somewhat less than before, which was never great.

Anyway, the real story here is that you should never immerse an electronics device it water, least of all one with it’s “hood bolted shut”.