K750i takes dunkin’ – and keeps on clickin’

Sept. 22, 2006

By John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

Sony Ericsson K750i front, the phone side

Sony Ericsson K750i back, the camera side

My Sony-Ericsson K750i camera-phone has just survived a near-death experience.
    We were hosting a cookout at our house on Labor Day, Sept. 4, 2006, and when I put my swimming trunks on, I clipped my K750i to my waist to walk out to the pool deck.
    My usual routine is to remove it from my waist as soon as I get outside and deposit it on a table beside wherever I park on the deck at poolside. But this time I didn’t do that.
    A mind is a terrible thing to lose. Has anybody seen mine? I lost it somewhere.

I don’t recall the exact sequence of events, but my middle grandson, Nicholas, the one who can fly off the diving board, was already in the pool enjoying himself. He and his mother, my daughter Layla, were the first guests among family and friends to arrive.
    I remember chatting with Layla for a few minutes and I remember thinking to myself, “You ought to join Nicholas and take a swim.”
    So I did. After wading in through the shallow end as I usually do, I launched out into the deep end to join Nicholas and swam around a bit, having fun with him.
    When I swam back to the shallow end and stood up, Nicholas looked at me sort of funny and pointed to my waist and said, “You probably shouldn’t have that on.”

He was pointing to my K750i, which was still clipped to the waistband of my trunks. Oops! Indeed I should not have, I replied, and quickly exited the pool with my soggy camera-phone still in its leather case.
    My daughter Layla has already had some unfortunate experiences with soggy cellphones (including one she lost entirely while falling off a jet ski at Ledbetter Lake) and advised the best thing to do is to quickly open up the device as much as possible to drain as much water as possible.
    So I opened the back, removed the battery and SIM card, took out the memory card and also opened the sliding cover that exposes the camera lens.
    It was dry inside the battery compartment, but inside the LCD screen was about half-full of water. Not a good sign.
    The partially dismembered, soggy corpse spent the rest of that day lying in the sun on a table at poolside in the fond hope that would dry it out. But by day’s end, the LCD screen was still sloshing with pool water.

So I took the remains inside and later that evening looked up the repair number for Sony-Ericsson on their website. Sorry, the company rep told me, you now own $300-worth of useless, soggy parts.
    It will cost more to repair it than it’s worth, he said. For what it’s worth, the rep also informed that water damage is the leading cause of cell-phone demise. He said as soon as these devices get wet, corrosion starts almost instantly, rendering them dead, dead, dead.
    After that conversation I figured “what have I got to lose?” So I left my partly disassembled K750i lying on my bedroom dresser for a few days to see if the visible water in the LCD would dry out.
    At least one ray of hope glimmered when I went to Wally World and bought a cheap Motorola cell-phone off the shelf. I put my Cingular SIM card in the Motorola phone and it worked just fine. Unfortunately, the SIM card did not contain my phone book of contacts from the K750i, but at least it worked. And I knew the SIM card had not been wiped by its close encounter with chlorinated pool water.
    (You don’t realize how addicted you are to cell phones until you don’t have one.)

After about a week I checked my K750i again and, lo and behold, the water was gone, at least visibly in the LCD.
    So figuring again, “what have I got to lose?” I put the battery back in, closed it up and pushed the power button. No go. Dead as a door knob.
    Still not giving up, I took it back apart, wrapped the open device in a paper napkin and placed it on top of the A/C vent in our bedroom and left it another week.
    On Monday, Sept. 18, on the two-week anniversary of my soggy misadventure, I retrieved it from its chilly torture test, put it back together again and hit the power button. Lo and behold, it lives!

Not only did it power up, but after going through the set-up process again, it works!
    Going that long without a battery obviously purged the memory from the device, but when I plugged in the SIM card and the memory card, it not only reconnected to the Cingular network, it also copied my phone book of contact numbers back into memory.
    The camera also works just fine, so expect some more photos coming here soon.
    Reminds me of those old Timex commercials, “Take’s a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.”
    Except in this case, it takes a dunking but lives to go clicking and talking once again.
    But I do hereby resolve that my K750i will not be visiting our pool deck again. If I just absolutely, positively have to have a cell-phone at poolside, I can always put my SIM card in my el cheapo Motorola, and if it gets wet, so what?

(John Myers is a photojournalist who lives in Rockingham, NC)