The biggest thing you have to worry about is salt. Salt will corrode the electronics, and rice usually doesn't pull it out.
What srmccoy said.
Even if your phone comes back to life, it could go bad within weeks or months - the residual salts left after most of the water evaporates act as a moisture trap and also rapidly accelerate corrosion processes. It is very hard to know what kind of saltwater exposure the unit suffered - so, you could get lucky and the phone will survive until your normal replacement lifetime of the phone ... or not.
Water is actually used to rinse circuit boards after they are assembled - for 98% of electronics, pure water is not a hazard, so long as power is not applied to the circuit when the water hits it. But - there's the other 2% of electronic components - things like microphones, speakers, etc which can be damaged by water exposure, and there's other stuff in you phone you might not want getting wet (the camera lens system, autofocus drive, etc), so I can not say that I would advise you to pull the battery and dunk the whole phone in distilled water.
In the hands of a skilled technician, it might be OK to disassemble the phone and locally clean areas which are obviously contaminated with salt residues; but that's not something that should be undertaken by people that don't have a lot of good tools and a strong mechanical aptitude.
The stickers won't tell you what the future holds for your phone - they are there so that VZW can detect when their customers are obviously trying to defraud them with false warranty claims. And in the case of saltwater - if you got any inside the phone, it will be trivial to observe the residues no matter what the stickers indicate.
As for protecting your phone when at the beach - a couple of weeks ago, I had an ocean fishing accident where I was swept into 10+ feet of water in the surfline - wearing heavy boots, waders, and no PFD. I was swimming against the surf for perhaps a minute or so. My Eris was in my shirt pocket, and survived the ordeal because it was inside a ziplock bag - inside yet another ziplock bag. In hindsight, though, it was probably
me that should have stayed in the car. I could have died, but my phone would have been fine! (I wouldn't trust just a single ziplock bag though - I killed a different phone years ago in a different fishing situation, by trusting a single ziplock.)
Good luck with your phone.
eu1
. Here are some other threads with things folks have tried and done. Good luck.Now, we are even!
