So I got the "someone dropped it into the toilet" call...

So I was getting stuff done at work, making a money so I could buy a food or a thing when I got a phone call from an unknown number. There was a crazy person on the other side. She, however, wasn't unknown.

Once I worked through the sobs, I found out that 'SOMEONE' had dropped her iPhone 4 into the toilet. This 'SOMEONE' had left it in the toilet until she found it. Then she turned it on. It didn't turn on and thus the tears and sobs of near inconsolable despair.

So I left work, picked up my kit, SIM adapter, spare 3GS and a fresh bag of rice and drove the forty minutes to her home. I popped the back glass, SIM and battery, pat dried the parts and put them into a tupperware full of rice for ~48 hours. I moved her SIM to the 3Gs with an adapter and left it as a loaner.

I reassembled the phone. It powered up nicely. I connected to my WiFi and forced a manual iCloud backup (last one was in March). On examining the iPhone, I see a large number of small white dust like particles that seem to get back-lit when a bright pixel is behind a given speck. It doesn't look like dead pixels.

More worrying was the battery didn't seem to charge. I ordered a new battery off Amazon. Slightly after I placed the order, the battery started charging. Hurray! Then the iPhone started rebooting after a few minutes of use... boo.

So, the new battery arrived today and I installed it. The phone ran fine without rebooting. The new battery wouldn't charge again, though. I tried multiple chargers/cables. I put the original battery back in and it would charge but was continuing to reboot after a few minutes of use.

So, this is where I am. The iPhone 4 with the new battery is currently at the stage that it needs to charge a bit to start. I'll leave it plugged in overnight. I am temped to find my pentalobe screwdriver and open my working 4s and see if the batteries are compatible and put my working battery into the 4 and the new battery into my 4s and see if the magic blue smoke stays in or not.

What I think. I think the screen is annoying but usable. I think if I swap batteries and the new replacement battery is bad, I'll work through an RMA cycle. I don't know if I really want to tear it down to replace the screen/digitizer. At some point, driving an hour to the local Apple Store and paying for the problem to go away (and better yet, it not being my fault when the next problem occurs) may be the way to go. I don't want to burn through cash before I get to that point, though.

Suggestions?

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