YouTube Video With 45M Views Claims Hitting Play Will Fix Your Wet Smartphone
Have you ever waded in a hot tub for a long while before realizing that your smartphone was in the pocket of your swimming trunks the whole time? Just me, then? That's cool, but I'm certainly not alone in having subjected a smartphone to water damage. One of the prevailing tips for such incidents is to plop a wet smartphone in a bag of rice to absorb the water, but there's a 4-year-old YouTube video with 45 million views that claims simply playing it can save the day. That's assuming your phone still turns on, of course.
That hot tub incident, by the way, happened many, many years ago with an iPhone 4S (the same one I reviewed in 2011), and I ended up getting it replaced with a SquareTrade warranty back in the day. A little more recently, I tripped and fell in a stream on a hike, submerging my iPhone XS Max to an unexpected bath. While it acted up for a while after that, it did eventually return to normal functionality.
Today's smartphones are much better at protecting against the elements, though it obviously depends on the specific make and model. There are still a lot of smartphones in the wild that don't react kindly to water. One common side effect of water damage is crackling from the speaker grill. That's exactly what this video (embedded below) aims to address, with the bold title, "Sound To Remove From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED )."
It's a 2-minute video with a sort of annoying buzz sound, which the uploader describes as a sound wave that will remove water from a mobile device.
"This sound will eject water from your phone speaker and completely remove water from your mobile speakers. This is the best way to get water out of your phone speaker," the video's description states.
Does it actually work, though? I'll tell you what, I've unintentionally subjected enough smartphones to water, that I'm loathe to intentionally do so, even for the sake of science. However, the folks at The Verge spoke with Carsten Frauenheim, a repair expert at iFixIt, who said that in theory, the video works similar to how an Apple Watch expels water.
“It’s just a specific oscillating tone that pushes the water out of the speaker grilles," he said, with the caveat that he's not sure how well a third-party version would work.
Good news on that front, too. The gang at iFixIt decided to test it out with four phones: iPhone 13, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 3, and Nokia 7.1. While not a perfectly controlled test, it yielded some interesting results. Playing the video appeared to work like a charm on the Pixel 7 Pro and somewhat on the iPhone 13 and Pixel 3. The Nokia 7.1, however, was not so lucky. You can check out the full write-up for all the details.
So there you go. If you do accidentally get water into your phone's speaker grill, it's worth giving the 2-minute a video a try.
