As we know, tech and water don't mix.
And so whenever I'm out on the lake enjoying the summer sun near the water's edge, I always
have this anxiety that I'm just going to, I dropped it.
And that anxiety doesn't just come from nowhere. According to phone insurer Ashurian, water-related claims go up 80% in the summer months, which
is great if you pay for cell phone insurance, but let's be real, nobody does.
I sure as hell don't. And so if the worst happens, that's it.
Or is it? It's why I want to meet a person who is able to get her phone back and working.
Her name is Fatima Gadsey, and her phone's resurrection made waves through the tech media
quite simply because of how long it's spent underwater.
Six months. And now? So here's the phone.
It's a white iPhone 11. And as you can see, it's perfectly in shape.
It looks almost as good as my new one.
But if you look at it like in certain spots, like right here, you can definitely see like
some rusting that went on from like being underwater.
But otherwise, it still charges perfectly fine. And when I got it back initially, from clay and I took it home, the microphone wasn't
working, speaker was super muffed. This story happened much like you'd expect on a nice day at the end of last summer, with
the enticing prospect of fun on bumper boats.
Very risky. So we're out on the water, and then I'm, you know, enjoying it, taking pictures of the
view, and then this oncoming boat actually started spraying water onto me.
And then I like totally lost balance, freaked out.
And then I dropped my phone in the water, and it was, and I couldn't even believe it
when I dropped it. It hit me and I just like wanted to cry then, but more than that, I didn't have any backups
or anything. Oh, so you didn't have an iTunes or an iCloud backup at all?
No, I actually didn't. Oh no. And I noticed that for a while I was saying that it's not backing up, and I was thinking
I have to get to that. But I didn't obviously ever consider that, oh, today is the day where I'm going to lose
everything and I should have backed it up sooner.
So how did she get it back and working?
Well it was a night in a shining wetsuit. His name is Clayton Helkenberg, and he's an affid free diver.
It's definitely a hobby of mine, just to swim. But the more I was swimming and the more like sunglasses and phones and stuff I was finding,
also the more trash we were finding. Oh, a vape.
Still got some juice in it. But with the trash one can also find treasure, and Clayton finds all sorts of things, drones,
go-pros, sunglasses, and phones. Like these two Clayton found for us.
One is an iPhone X, and the other an iPhone 7.
This in fact was the first iPhone to get an official IP67 rating thanks to the solid
state home button and the courageous removal of the headphone jack.
I think it was a major help in this story. The IP code is defined by the International Electro-Technical Commission Standard number
60529. Oh, look, they turned on.
Okay, sorry if this is getting a little boring, but you've probably seen the IP code on cell
phone spec sheets. It has a meaning. The first number specifies the level of protection from solids, and the second specifies protection
from water. So, if a device has a rating of IP11, it means that it's protected against an object larger
than 50 millimeters, or a hand.
And it's protected against falling drops of water.
Yep, this is at least IP11.
Well, after 67, I think I'm f***ed.
Um, sorry. At IP67, it means that these are completely dust-tight and protected from water ingress
at up to 1 meter depth for 30 minutes. Apple hasn't even stopped there, though.
Any iPhone above the 10s is rated at IP68, which allows for depths of greater than 1 meter.
So an iPhone 12 is rated at up to 6 meters, 11 Pros are rated at 4 meters, and Fatima
is 11 at 2 meters, which incidentally was about the depth her phone was at for all those
months. I guess then what's like the ratio of stuff in pretty decent condition versus...
Oh, it's pretty low. It's pretty low. So for, let's say, the 200 pairs of sunglasses I found, I probably found 20 that were usable
condition, I would say. Yeah. How about for the ratio of, like, phones or tech you find under your watch?
Phone. Go-Pros to start with. Go-Pros always work.
I have not found an unworking GoPro yet. iPhone 11s, I've found three of them, all three have worked.
I have one working iPhone 10, but I think it was the S8 or S9 that briefly worked, and
then it decided to shut off again. Last year, I sent two big boxes to a guy in, I think it was in Ontario or something like
that, and his channel's the Phone Guru, and then he was able to fix a whole bunch of them,
so I planned to send them some more in the future when I get some better ones, but got away for the summer to people drop some better looking phones.
Okay, so this iPhone 7 appears to be fine, but it's locked, so I can't get in, obviously.
And then this iPhone 10, well, when I first plugged it in, it was boot looping like crazy,
and I put it into restore mode and tried updating it because I don't want to delete anything
that's on here, but I can't really get that to work, and if I were to restore it completely,
then it means I wouldn't be able to get the person's data back to them.
So let's see if we can reach out to them.
Where do I start? Yeah, so what I do with phones, hers, it just turned right on, which was kind of cool, but
iPhone has quite a good lock system, so I'm not cracking that code anytime soon.
So what I do with all phones is I just take the SIM card out, and I plug it into an old
phone, and I have a SIM card reader in that, and it just shows me the phone number that
the phone's registered to, and I just call the phone or text the phone, and if somebody
answers, awesome, and she answers right away, and yeah, it's cool, that's how that works.
Okay, so I got this Android phone to do this, so let's switch the SIM cards here.
Okay, and let's take this one out.
Huh, it's an AT&T SIM card, I wonder what that means, put this in here, okay, it looks
like we got service, there's no number on here, it's blank, does that mean it's an old
SIM card? Okay, so it's an American phone, maybe it's not connected to an American network, and
we live close to the border, let's see if that works.
Blank, darn it, I was hoping to get that phone back.
Okay, that didn't work.
So let's try the next SIM card.
Okay, it's got service.
If I try phoning this number, it's ringing, oh my goodness, okay, oh my gosh, I got some
text messages. The number of the guy who sent message to this phone.
This is a lot harder than I was expecting, I mean how did Clayton do it with Fatima's
phone?
You got your new phone in December, and then a couple months later, what happened?
It was a normal day, I was just chilling, and then I got a text saying, hi, my name
is Clay, did you lose a cell phone in Harrison Lake?
So it was just really, really odd that someone was asking me about this thing that happened
six months ago, and knew exactly where I lost it, I almost genuinely felt like someone's
trying to lure me into somewhere.
So all it was was Clayton trying to return a phone back to their rightful owner, hopefully
with all its photos and memories intact.
I don't know how to feel about receiving something that I was definitely heartbroken to lose,
and it was such a stressful time. I just felt like a lot of memories or pieces of a big time in my life were just kind of
given back to me, so I was mostly grateful for that.
And then I was also thinking like, now what do I do with the second phone?
So what does it feel like when you return a phone to someone? It's awesome, some of the reactions are just people are in total disbelief sometimes, and
yeah, it's pretty cool. Too bad I won't be getting the same reactions myself.
I don't have a lot of Apple stuff at all, like I used to have an iPod and I was about it, but yeah, those iPhone 11's, like Apple makes a crazy waterproof phone, it's very
impressive honestly. Like six months around 10 feet of water, it's just crazy.
Two other ones that called us, they were both charged when I found them, the guys had lost
them the day before, but yeah, I jumped in and I just clicked the button and it turned
on underwater and there's a background of a dog on it, and it was just super funny.
So I guess after this whole ordeal, what's the big lesson you've learned?
Back up your phone, always get hooked on it, I don't know, I assumed, because the last
backup I did was like on iTunes, and that was really lengthy, but I didn't know that
now you could just still just do it on the phone, just go on the iCloud and then subscribe
to it and then it backs up for you, so definitely very easy, very affordable process.
And if you're ever out where you might drop your phone, put it in a zip pocket, just don't
take it on the water.
It's reassuring to know that if your iPhone dunks into a shallow beach or pool, it has
a chance of surviving, but that doesn't mean you should be careless, because despite there
being people like Clayton around, six months is still an awful long time to be without
a phone. Thank you for joining us at this Mac Address from the shores of Cultus Lake, British Columbia.
Now, I'm curious if you yourself have had any tales of an iPhone surviving, or maybe
not surviving, a dunk underwater. Feel free to share them in the comments below.