update: the phone is currently under a lamp drying with the battery removed. i my friend has resisted the temptation to take it apart and dry the circuits with a towel or in the oven.

Good news! My daughter dropped hers in the bathtub last week. She took it apart (the bare minimum taking apart...not prying off microchips or anything) and blew it dry on cold setting and laid it out (open) on paper towels overnight and it was ok.

Bad news! Last time I was at Verizon the tech told me that there's some kind of sticker inside most cells that changes color if it gets wet, which tells the phone people that you've done something stupid (like washed it or dropped it in the bathtub ;P) and so voids your warranty. The reason he was telling me was because my son opened his phone and messed around and scraped the sticker off, and so even though the phone had never been wet, they wouldn't honor the warranty for his crappy phone because they couldn't prove it hadn't been in water, so we had to pay to replace his dumb old phone, which had broken for some entirely other reason.

...there's some kind of sticker inside most cells that changes color if it gets wet, which tells the phone people that you've done something stupid (like washed it or dropped it in the bathtub ;P) and so voids your warranty.

bastardos. just what i would expect from Verizon.

thanks! ...for my friend.

It will dry, and most likely it will work.

My daughter washed her phone in the washing machine, and this is how I know this.

Cool, thanks. It takes a tiny Phillips jewelers screwdriver just to get into the thing. Ghaaah.

How to save a wet cell phone

The stickers are called "liquid damage indicators" and there may be more than one.

warranty void when wet is pretty much universal, there's chips in there that don't do wet very well. However I've managed to save one bathtub-hopping phone by opening (battery out simply way) and drying. My Motorola Razr didn't do as well though.

Last year when I dunked my laptop, it took 3 days to dry out sufficiently to work again. The screen had dark patches in it till they dried out which took about a month. But this was plain water, not detergent. Also not a cell phone, obviously.

...it took 3 days to dry out sufficiently to work again ... But this was plain water, not detergent.

cellphone maybe needs trip thru rinse cycle now. to get detergent out.

nah.