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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
TECHNICALLY you can drop a running circuit into *PURE* water and nothing happens. Water isn't very conductive.
I'm fairly certain that if you tried this, the water would be rendered conductive by dissolving whatever contaminants you happen to have on the surface of the device and you'd still get a short. YMMV.
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.
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?
Sorry, you're both wrong. It's the same iPhone and it was just the glass they replaced.