I’ve heard people suggest drying out phones in rice, but until yesterday I didn’t have cause to test the theory, but having had a slight accident yesterday in the little girls room, I put theory into practice.

Padi field, near Colva, Goa January 2006

I have a HTC Wildfire which is not insured at the moment due to not being able to afford the premiums. I paid phone insurance for years and never had to claim. Since cancelling the cover Daughter 1 dropped her Nokia E6 Smartphone in her orange juice and waited too long after submerging it for the rice to work, and Daughter 2 had her Samsung Galaxy Ace stolen at a festival. Neither were insured so all our ’emergency’ back up phones are now in use!

I was about to sit down yesterday morning and I heard a bang and a quiet splash… I looked around to see my HTC sinking into the fortunately sparklingly clean water in the bowl. I had forgotten it was in the back pocket of my jeans 😦

I quickly grabbed it & a wad of toilet paper and dried it off as I raced downstairs, jeans balanced on my hips. I grabbed a jar of white rice and a plastic container while simultaneously taking the back off the phone & removing the battery, SIM card & micro SD card & drying them with the toilet paper. (Absorbent kitchen towel will do just as well) Then I covered the bottom of the container with rice, (not cooked!) and then put all my phone pieces in the box & completely covered them & filled the container with rice. I then resisted all temptation to check how my phone was doing & left it in a warm dry place until this morning.

When I got up this morning I fished out all my phone parts from the rice & brushed all the rice from them with a small paintbrush. I put all the pieces back together and pressed the power on button….. The moment of truth…. Actually the several moments… My phone took ages to power up, but eventually it did. Apart from the fact that the date initially was June 1st 1980, which is a bit of an impossibility. ( I wonder what the Tomorrows World team would have thought if a fully functioning smart phone landed on their desks in 1980! )

A few minutes later the date and British Winter Time correction had all updated themselves & my missing texts from yesterday started coming through.

All is well with my phone, although the little marker inside the phone that goes pink when the phone has got wet was bright red, so if it does develop a fault HTC will probably think it was dropping it in water that did the damage. Luckily nowadays I use my Gmail account to store all my contact details and no longer have to post a ‘lost contacts’ message to Facebook if my phone had indeed succumb to the toilet bloos. For me, this one facility of linking contacts to my online email account is what brings smart phones into their own. Otherwise I would be completely happy with my old Nokia 3210

Nokia 3210, ‘Boxy but good’