While water resistance has become a lot more common in recent years (to the point where you pretty much expect it from amid-range phoneor better), getting water in your phone can still be sub-optimal.
If your phone doesn’t have water resistance or you’re just keen to verify that you give your smartphone the best shot at recovering from a dunk in the water, these tips can help you dry your phone out (and get water out of its speakers). These steps are applicable to bothiPhonesandAndroid phones.
How to get water out of your phone
Before we do anything involving getting water out of your phone, the first thing to do is turn it off - you don’t want to be playing around with your phone while it’s on, so it’s safest to power it down.
If your phone isn’t water resistant, or if water has got past that resistance, the electrical current is a no-no until it’s dry.
Dry your phone
While this might sound obvious, a clean towel or cloth can go a long way on the outside of your phone, at least - dry it off carefully! It’s important that the cloth or towel is clean, though, as you don’t want dust or grit accidentally scratching a phone that you’re hoping to still use.
Keep your phone stable and steady throughout this and the steps below - shaking your phone around too much could help water get into any nooks and crannies it hasn’t yet invaded, which we don’t want.
Take out the SIM card tray
If your phone has a SIM tray and/or somewhere to add in a microSD card, remove both of these while you dry it off - these will open up new vents to some degree to allow more evaporation and drainage. Keep them out until right at the end of the process.
Leave your phone to dry
This is the crucial phase, and there are a few ways to do it. The simplest is to lay your phone flat on a towel or microfibre cloth and simply ignore it for a couple of days (48 hours is the standard window).
Ideally, you want this to be in a ventilated room that isn’t humid, so whichever space you can find that comes closest will do.
Back in the noughties conventional wisdom said that bowls of rice were the solution to all things, but that’s not really true and can easily lead to scratching, so keep things simple.
However, if you do want an extra tool then Silica Gel packets that often come in electronics packaging can help with water absorption, so feel free to place these under and on top of the phone while it dries.
Turn it back on
Once you’ve waited at least 48 hours, it’s probably time to check on your phone - power it back on to see if it works as you’d expect. If everything’s fine, then you might have gotten away with it.
Of course, it’s possible that water damage will rear its head later on, and this can take longer to manifest, which might leave you needing a proper repair, but this should help mitigate that risk.
How to get water out of a phone’s speakers
Even in really water-resistant phones, one area that can sometimes display surprising water damage is the speakers - we recently took a dip with our iPhone 13 Pro to take some snaps and found that it had a crackling sound even a few days later.
This is because of tiny amounts of water bouncing around the speakers inside the phone, and while it’s not easy to fix, the methodology above can work.
If you want to try something quicker, though, we recommendFix My Speakers- a simple and effective website. Pressing the big button on the site with your volume maxed out will play a pretty horrendous noise, one that will actually blow the water out of your speaker vents due to its frequency.
This isn’t a silver bullet, but playing the sound for a minute or two solved our problems, and hopefully could do the same for you.
