water doesn't break the phone (unless it is on), the stuff that is diluted to the water does....

I accidently submerged my N900 into the water of the Danube river yesterday. About one minute, but I had to care of the baby first, than the phone... it was about one ft under water.

Afterwards I had to bring the baby home, another 10 min of time...
Then I pulled off the back side, put out the battery and SIM card, slided out the keyboard and put all parts into the oven, at 50° C (not more, checked with a digital thermometer).

After 4 hours of drying, I put it out of the oven, and assembled it. The Nokia N900 was back to life, everything works as before, even keyboard and camera, and it is cleaner than ever...

Nokia quality pays off.

Today I just found some sand particles inside the home of the stylus... not a real problem.
Good luck!

PS
Rational for not using rice but oven: Time is what counts most here! Rice drying just takes too long. Every minute the water or humidity is inside the electronics, corrosion takes place. We must dry as fast as we can!

Water with no minerals has an extremly high electrical resistence and will cause no corrosion, it will just evaporate leaving no trace.

Btw corrosion does not only happen while the phone is wet, ie. drying phone in the oven will probably leave behind traces that may degrade the phone with time.

Mine had Kopperberg (link) spilt on it a few weeks ago.

I turned it off immediately and took the battery out. Tried to dry it the best i could on the outside parts. Put it in rice when i got home. Turned it on a few days later, it all looked to be working... until i tried to use the wifi or my sim card. Everything worked except any type of network connection

I dropped my phone in a sink full of water... It stayed in there for like just 1-2 seconds but still... I removed the battery, dried it up with towels and stuff.. It remained off for like 6 hours.. After that I tried to boot it and it went to Introduction video and crashed a few times after which IT DIDN'T BOOT ANYMORE AT ALL. It was completely unresponsive, it would not charge (the notification light didn't even glow.)... I was on the edge of killing my self then But well I hoped for the best and put it in a plastic bag full of rice overnight... IMAGINE MY SATISFACTION WHEN THE DAMN THING TURNED ON COMPLETELY FUNCTIONAL 30MINUTES AGO This thing is a ****ing beast when talking about survivability ><

One thing 'bothers' me tho. The fact that the whole system couldn't start or be charged must mean something stopped it from doing so. Does this phone have some kind of water-protection sensor or wut ? :X If it was a regular phone it should have ****ing fried when I booted it and was still wet ( well at least it seems it was still wet 6 hours in,otherwise i don't know why it went 'no-boot' mode ). Can someone clarify why this happened ? I'm not complaining of course Just curious

If water is inside the phone, the rice is useless, it will take ages to dry. The most important thing is to remove the battery as quick as you can. Then, if the water was clean, dry in an oven for some hours at about 50gC (do not go over 65gC !!!!). With salt water you should disassemble the phone and clean well with distilled water or adeguate solvent like indicated in previous posts and then dry the parts in the oven.

One thing is certain...

The fone is on borrowed time even if it re boots.

Imperative to do a back up and get all the info off it asap.

I would also recommend "washing" your device with deionized/distilled water as soon as possible after having dropped it into any other water, and if you get it to work again, backing up everything from the device.

My wife washed my ipod nano along with my Jeans one day on the normal cycle. The thing was soaked needless to say.

I took it apart somewhat, allowed it to dry for 4 days or so. Put it back together, and it worked fine!

I used it for about 2-3 months with no problems until it died. I took it apart again, but this time completely. Upon close inspection I realized there were heavy deposits and corrosion to the board... probably due to the hard tap water! (the water in my city is extremely hard, riddled with calcium deposits etc... my shower doors were made of clear glass, it is no longer clear due to the calcium deposits.)

The device was submerged for at least 30 minutes in the washer. I think having rinsed it in distilled water should not have caused further damage, but would probably have helped in reducing the amount of corrosion and deposits.

Just my 2 cents

The error was to wait 4 days.....
In this cases the water must go away in some hours otherwise corrosion and oxidation start their slow works. And the process accelerates exponentially with electricity.

For computer motherboards I use a dishwasher with plain old detergent - cleans them up nice and shiny. For drying I use towels, a lot of compressed air, followed by a few hours out in direct sunlight. I've never had one fail from this process yet. One day I'll luck out though : )