Dummies Guide to Unwatering the Mobile

Seeing as how I wrote about dropping my mobile phone I thought I'd write about how to save it! [afterall I was able to save it very successfully once! ;)] A few pointers below, in order of the time each action should be carried out! Red being the initial actions (not necessary to do) & blue being the actions that must occur if those in red occur.

• Buy the phone --> make sure there is some sort of insurance on it (some times it will be included in the home and contents insurance)
• Use the phone--> Highly important to keep backing up the phone contents as frequently as possible, to save a lot of hastle in the future in case anything unfortunate happened to it.
• Drop the phone in water -->
  
• Get it out immediately (don't just look at it and stare and wonder whether it will float away (as I did on the second occasion.. LOL!)
• Open it up and separate whatever you can as much as you can (remove battery, Sim, memory card etc etc..)
• As soon as you have access to a hair dryer and a power outlet make sure you lie the parts of the phone on a flat surface (no dirt or WATER!!!), with a newspaper on the flat surface.
• Turn on the hair dryer and dry the phone, on a medium setting (too hot will melt it (almost did that too ;) )
• Dry with hair dryer for 5 minutes at a time letting it cool down a little for 2 minutes in between.
• Repeat this as many times as possible (or until there appears to be no more water, usually the screen will fog if there is still water. Its a good indication)
• Once this has been done leave the phone to dry under natural sources (sunlight works miracles)
• Leave the phone to dry for a minimum of 1 and a half days and DO NOT SWITCH ON until this one and a half days is up.
• [optional] i read somewhere that its a good idea to put the phone in the middle of rice (Indians use rice for everything! ;-) ) The idea behind this is that it will soak up any excess water. But I would be careful and only use this as a last resort as any small particles can also enter the phone.

So there you go the survival guide to "unwatering" your phone! If anyone unfortunately drops there phone into water and uses these tips, be sure to let me know how they worked for you. The reason I was unable to recover my phone the second time was because I was too late getting the hair dryer on it. It was a matter of life and death a few minutes earlier and I could have still saved my phone! ***sigh*** Also another tip which I forgot to mention, the phone may partially work even afterwards, so if you have a cable which connects to your computer restore all the data. I did it and that will save me a lot of hastle once I get my new phone.

My old phone was a nokia 6280 (those are the ones with a sliding cover, which means they are very difficult to fully take apart).