The Wise Penguin Tips and Tricks Blog

Just when you think the impossible will never happen, it has! You dropped your phone in water! If you think all hope is lost when it comes to saving your wet mobile phone, you are wrong. Before you panic, try these steps - they can get your phone working again.

1. Before even thinking of doing anything else, take your phone out the water and REMOVE THE BATTERY AND SIM CARD IMMEDIATELY! Time is off the essence when it comes to saving your wet cell phone and every second counts - so remove them quickly! Do not turn turn your phone on just to "check if it still works". This just wastes time! You must dry the battery off as much as possible with paper towels and cotton swabs. Next you should wrap the battery in dry paper towels and set it aside. While you won't save all of your information on your SIM card, you won't lose all of it if taken out on time.

2. Dry the phone. You can use paper towels, cotton swabs etc. You must be thorough. Go inside the battery case, between the buttons, and inside any connectors going into the phone that's just been dropped in water. Shake the phone, some more water might appear which you might not have noticed before. Keep drying it and when no more water appears when you shake the phone, set your cell phone aside.

3. Use compressed air or a blow dryer to blow air into the keypad, battery case, and the ports. If your using a blow-dryer, do not forget to hold it away from the phone as the phone will get damaged or melted by the extremely hot air.

4. Once you have dried the phone as much as you can, put your cell phone into a bowl. Pour uncooked rice over the cell phone and make sure you completely cover it with rice. Leave the phone aside for a day. You might think this is stupid, but the rice will act as a dessicant and suck any left over moisture from your cell phone that's been dropped in water.

5. After you've left the cell phone aside in the rice, the phone should be very dry. Reinsert the battery and turn the phone on. There is a good chance your phone might turn on and work if you followed these steps as soon as your phone was submerged from water. Chances of your cell phone working again improve if you haven't tried to turn the phone on while it was wet, and you dry it as soon as you took it out.

That is how to save a wet cell phone, if this didn't work for you, there is nothing more you can do to save your cell phone. Its dead. R.I.P

Good luck.

The Iphone is a fairly easy-to-use device so odds are that you haven't even looked at the manual yet. But there are a number of small features that might be of interest to you. Here they are.

By tapping the status bar (bar at the top with the clock) you will scroll to the top of the content, IF the content is scrollable. This feature can come very handy when you have scrolled down a long web page and want to get back to the top but you are too lazy to scroll back up. Just tap the damn bar :p

This is the most complicated method of all time, probably. What you do first is open you calculator app. Hold your Iphone in landscape mode (90°). There is you scientific calculator :)

Press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons at the same time and your Iphone will take a screenshot of your current screen. A camera shutter sound will be heard, the screen will flash white, and the screenshot will save in the "Saved Photos" library in the Photos app.

Press + Hold the skip forward/back arrows to fast forward or rewind instead of skipping tracks. Also, you can press on the album art to manually Fast Forward or Rewind.

More to come...

A lot of people depend on their mobile phones in every aspect of their lives, from talking to family and friends to business, from emailing and texting to playing games. When someone is so reliant on their mobile phone for almost everything they do, it will be quite aggravating when their mobile phone's battery dies at the time they need their phone, not to mention in an emergency. I will tell you a few tips and tricks to extend your mobile phone battery's life and make it last longer.

1. The easiest and most effective way to preserve your mobile phone's charge is to switch your phone off when not in use. When you're going to bed, or going to work and are not planning on answering your mobile phone, just switch it off.

2. Try not to put up wallpapers. They might be nice and cool to look at - but you won't be saying that when you need your phone and you can't switch it on because the battery is drained. Wallpapers use a lot of energy and power so by not using them it will increase battery life. Why not just put a nice picture up instead?

3. Turn off your Bluetooth when you're not using it. Bluetooth uses up a LOT of your battery life so if you aren't using it just switch it off. Or, switch to a regular corded headset, because they use less power. Also, leaving your Bluetooth on when not using it allows hackers to just hack into your phone, which you don't really want.

4. Only use your ringer OR the vibrate function for calls, but avoid using them both at the same time. A lot of battery power can be lost by using the vibrate function alone, so using both can put an overwhelming drain on your battery.

5. Turn down the brightness of your screen. The screen sucks a tremendous amount of power from your battery, just like the screens on laptops. Visit your phone's settings menu to find the screen controls and lower the brightness to increase battery life.

6. Try not to play games, scroll through pictures or watch videos too often, as these functions use a lot of power. This is especially important when you know you'll have to wait a long while to charge your phone.

7. Charge your mobile phone less often as charging when you don't need to (say, when the battery is at 50%) will reduce the battery's capacity. On average, cell phone charge lasts about 3 days so it is unnecessary to charge more often than about 3 days, depending on your phone of course.

8. Try to avoid playing music without earphones. When you listen to music make sure you are listening through earphones and not just through the phone. Playing music without earphones will decrease battery life faster than when you listen music with earphones as your phone uses more energy and power to play the music without earphones.

And there you have it, a few tips and tricks from The Wise Penguin that will increase your mobile phones battery life.

WisePenguin,