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What Has Your Phone Survived?
NotAnIndividual writes "On an ice fishing trip two months ago, I lost my iPhone somewhere in the snow. I searched and searched, but to no avail. But just this weekend when moving the ice hut, lo and behold there it was. I quickly threw it into a bag of rice and placed it under a lamp to defrost. Three hours later I plugged it in. I wasn't expecting much. I mean, really, it had been frozen in snow for the last two months! To my surprise, the Apple logo popped up. I put in the SIM card and voila, my iPhone was back. My apps, my contacts, my music and more importantly my life were back. And this is the same iPhone that I dropped in a cup of coffee a few months ago! This got me wondering how much damage a cell phone can actually take. How have other Slashdot users punished their phones without actually killing them completely?"
There's practically no difference between being frozen for one day, or arbitrarily long. There are only two dangers: contraction of metal and joints while freezing; and condensation/expansion while thawing. I'm sure the rice helped with the condensation, although putting it under a lamp couldn't have helped; better to warm it as slowly as possible.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Phones break from physical impact(shattering LCD and stuff), or from short circuits.. or from component failure(caps blowing, overheating, etc). TECHNICALLY you can drop a running circuit into *PURE* water and nothing happens. Water isn't very conductive. FYI
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Cooking isn't just about putting water in things, you know...
Also, rice does indeed appear to be a desiccant, just not as strong a desiccant as purpose-made things like silica gel. It's fairly common to put a few grains of dry rice in a salt shaker to prevent the salt sticking together from moisture.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
All those little 'do not eat' packets that come sealed in packages with devices and items you buy contain a desiccant. And it's reusable. Usually the desiccant in them is crystal granules that are blue when dry, and go white when they've absorbed moisture. You can bake them at a low heat in an oven to re-dry them out for reuse. In fact, it's worth saving all the little 'do not eat' packets for that purpose. You can tear the packet open and keep the granules inside to combine in a larger container if you wish.
It's common practice to use that kind of desiccant in a sealed safe where you are storing rare coins or anything else you don't want to tarnish. You can buy it in bulk quantities for that purpose. Put the recharged-blue desiccant in the safe before sealing it, and it'll pull all the moisture out of the sealed-in air and reduce corrosion/tarnishing of the silver/copper coins.
In the case of the salt shaker, the rice isn't absorbing moisture (the salt is WAY better at it than the rice is), it's being used for the same function as the bearing in a spray paint can, to break up the clumps mechanically. You could actually use some metal ball bearings for the same purpose (make sure they're bigger than the holes in the shaker, obviously).
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
He doesn't deserve to post stories here. A true geek would have backups of everything. My E65 syncs all the contacts, notes and schedules to an online server every night.
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Umm you have to clean and dry and treat cast iron. You just don't use soap on it.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Woah, you've never heard of Confession? That where you have to go if you do anything they don't like. It's a kind of self-service court system, where you're your own prosecutor and the company's local sales and support manager is the sentencing judge. In the last couple of centuries the lock-in has been relaxed quite a bit in most countries, but before that you were likely to be killed.
OCD geeks aren't the only type of geek out there, you know.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
I worked at Nintendo around the time of the N64 and up until the Gamecube and a lot of the calls we received on the support line regarding Gameboys that had water damage were the result of being dropped in the toilet. Take the batteries out and let the unit dry (without powering it on while its wet) and the majority of the time they were okay.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
My Blackberry 8900 ended up in a swimming pool last Saturday. Was completely submerged for maybe 5 minutes in about a foot of swimming pool water.
When I realized it was in the pool (in my swim suite pocket actually), I immediately got it out of the water. The camera's flash light was constant on, as was the front red LED. I immediately took out the battery and laid it out to dry (no bag of rice handy). I dried it for 12+ hours before trying to put the battery back in. It didn't come back on when I did.
The battery, though, survived. I stripped a cosmetically beat-up 8900's guts, put those guts into my case, put my battery and SIM card in it, and was working again.
The guts that got submerged looked like they were caked in chlorine.
My iPhone's screen shattered when it fell less than 3 feet from my bed and apple wanted $200 +tax to fix it. I talked them down to $100 but the fact that it took them less than 10 minutes to fix still left me feeling a bit taken advantage of.
Sorry, you're both wrong. It's the same iPhone and it was just the glass they replaced.
.Mac: pay a lot for things you pay your provider for too. But hey, it's Apple, so it's better, no?
-- Cheers!
As he felt the need to mention the phone's brand name four fucking times in that short advertisement^W "story", he clearly cares more about that than about those other things which were only mentioned once.