Water Damage and Powering On

Question

My wife dropped her iPhone into water today.  She got it out instantly.  We could tell it had some issues, as music coming out of speaker sounded bad.  We were on our way out of town, so we grabbed a bowl and rice and brought it with us.  She wrapped it in the paper towels and put in the rice.  45 minutes later the noise issue was gone, but it kept registering screen presses.  So, we put it back in the rice, and left it in there for a few hours.  After watching a movie, we checked it again, and the phone would not turn back on.  We got home and plugged it into a wall charger.  About 20 minutes has passed, and still nothing.  I thought maybe it somehow got set to DFU mode as the screen would stay blank, so I plugged it into our MacBook.  Still nothing, no error in iTunes, no power at all.  I thought it was odd that 2 hours after being dropped, some problems would clear up like the garbled speakers, and some would first start, like not powering on.  Any thoughts?

Answer 1

When dropping the device in water it would have been best to turn it off straight away and leaving it in the rice for atleast 72 hours. This is not a guaranteed fix but its always worth a try but the fact the iPhone is not powering on confirms hardware issue due to water damage of course.
What you could do is maybe try a reset:
- hold the home button and sleep/wake button down at the same time
- as soon as you see the apple release both buttons
If that fails to power the device back on all you can do is either wait a bit longer to see if it needed a bit more time to dry internally but if it does not power on then you'll need to look at getting the iPhone replaced for a fee if that is something you would want.