What should you do if your smartphone stops working after you drop it in water? That’s easy: You should put it in rice to dry off… or should you? While we’ve heard many success stories about people drying off their phones by putting them in rice, at least one study claims there are more efficient ways to dry out your soaked device.
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This article at The Verge directs our attention to a study conducted last year by Gazelle in which the website tried drying out wet smartphones using several different components and it found that rice was actually the least absorbent of all of them.
So what worked better than rice for absorbing water from waterlogged phones? Here’s the full list:
- Cat litter
- Couscous (pearl)
- Classic rolled oatmeal
- Instant oatmeal
- Instant rice
- Silica gel (crystal kitty litter)
Some of these are flat-out nasty — there is no way we’d shove our phone into kitty litter even if it’s completely fresh and unused. Couscous, on the other hand, is intriguing — it’s more granular than uncooked rice and it also absorbs water more quickly.
In addition to this evidence, The Verge’s article lists some more reasons why putting your phone in rice really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Check it out by clicking here.
