Magical YouTube video pumps water out of your wet phone (no rice needed)

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Magical YouTube video pumps water out of your wet phone (no rice needed)
There's a group of people bonding over a smartphone water ejection video on YouTube.

The most commonly dispensed advice for anyone who gets their phone wet is to put it in rice. It's such a popular remedy that it has its own Wikipedia page. What if you don't have rice on hand or that remedy doesn't work for you? Well, there is a video on YouTube that people swear by for drying out their phones.

The Verge decided to investigate how legit the video is and why it's able to accomplish a task that until recently was best left to a bowl of rice.

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The video is 2 minutes and 6 seconds long and it plays a buzzing sound that might cause your phone to vibrate a little.

People who have commented below the video can't stop raving about how well it works every time they get their phone wet.

So, what magic spell is the video casting to dry out your phone?

Actually, it's not magic, it's science. The sound has been carefully engineered to generate an air motion strong enough to push droplets of liquid out of the speaker. This is also how the Apple Watch's water ejection feature works

Folks at The Verge and iFixit were a little skeptical about how well a third-party audio not specifically tuned for different phones would work, so they tested it on four phones: an iPhone 13, a Pixel 7 Pro, a Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1.

The phones were first soaked in a UV bath for about a minute, after which they were tapped to eject some water, and then a water-ejection video was played on them. The phones were left out overnight before they were checked to see where there was still residue from the UV dye to find out which spots still had liquid.

The results were mixed. The Pixel 7 Pro was completely dry, the Nokia 7.1 hardly survived, and "the iPhone 13 and Pixel 3 were somewhere in between."

The squad also made a close-up video of each phone's speaker and it showed them emptying liquid. In short, the video does work but not necessarily flawlessly. While it may be able to remove the droplets around the speaker, it will have no effect on other intrusion spots such as the USB port and SIM card slot.

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Also, regardless of how perfectly the video works for you, it's best not to carry your phone with you to the shower or have it around when washing dishes, as a phone seal get less resistant to water over time.

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