How to fix a rained on iPhone
Friday, April 4th, 2008
First off a warning that doing anything unusual with your iPhone probably breaks the warranty, and at the very least will make Steve Jobs cry, so everything is always at your own risk.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to drag a wagon full of food to some youth that we’re camping with our churches “Pilgrims Survival Journey“. While this was great by itself, when you add a iPhone in the pocket of my cargo shorts, and what appeared to be torrential downpours of rain, you end up with a recipe for disaster.
I was only slightly worried at the time, assuming that my phone would be fine, but it turned out that when I got home it was only 80% working. The phone worked for periods, but every minute and a half to 3 minutes would show the “Device not compatible with iPhone” message, with nothing hooked up to it. Sadly, with this message showing up so often, I noticed a significant decrease in battery and knew that I’d have to fix it or be off to the Apple Store in hopes for a uniquely exchange or fix. One other problem I noticed when trying to power down the phone (the first suggestion when any electronic equipment gets wet) was that when shutting it off the phone would automatically restart no matter how many times I tried.
After a lazy twitter was sent out, Matt Williams suggested (among other things) applying a little rubbing alcohol to the dock connector with a q-tip. After doing this and keeping my iPhone standing on end (with dock connecter facing down) all seems to be well and I’ve received no further error messages.
Apparently the rubbing alcohol trick is fairly well known, what this does is helps the water to evaporate a bit faster, and since none of the actual circuitry was damaged inside of my phone (it was in my pocket so it was protected from any direct contact with water) the alcohol got rid of whatever was triggering the message (and the restarts on shutdown) that was happening on my phone. Strangely I also noticed a story from The Washington Post about correcting electronics that get wet by leaving them in a bowl of rice overnight (via LifeHacker).