Fix for Essential Phone?

[Omar Barreto]

So I had an accident that rendered my essential phone drowned. I tried a few online suggestions, like bag of rice for 72 ish hours, silica packets, etc. Went on to turn it on, for literally a sec or lit up and quickly shot off. Later I found out that with external light shined on the screen the phone actually works as if nothing ever happened, except that the screen doesn't light up. So I figured, probably needs a new digitizer (full screen replacement), So I replaced it, yet the screen still doesn't light up. Everything in the phone still works except for the fact that the screen won't light up. I even tried turning the brightness up, but it didn't matter because the screen always lights up when booting the phone, so... Any ideas?

 

[anon(10614692)]

It's impossible to diagnose on a forum. It could be the motherboard needs replacing but without the device in my hands I would be speculating.

 

[Rukbat]

1. The best way to kill a wet phone is to dry it. All the water evaporates, concentrating all the impurities that were in the water (they don't evaporate, only the H2O does). And, if you dropped it into the ocean or - even worse - a chlorinated swimming pool, evaporating the water leaves concentrated acids (the pool has chlorine - water and chlorine combine to form HCl - hydrochloric acid). You want to flood the phone, no drown the phone, in alcohol. The plain stuff you get at the pharmacy. (It's not water, it dilutes the impurities, washes them out, absorbs the water - and leaves nothing.) See Oh, no! My Phone got Wet!

2. The digitizer is the outermost layer of glass on the screen. The screen is LCD, so there's a digitizer, an LCD layer and an LED layer under that, to provide light to the LCD. The LED layer isn't turning on. Why? The LED layer could have gone bad, but I suspect it's whatever is driving the LED layer. So you're probably in for a new motherboard. Shop around at repair shops that friends and neighbors recommend, and see what they estimate the repair cost to be. THIS IS NOT A DIY PROJECT! If you try, it's almost guaranteed that you'll be back here saying that you replaced the motherboard (because it was so much cheaperthan any shop wanted, but now you can't even see anything on the screen if you shine a light on it. And at that point, no reputable shop will repair it.

@Galactic Zoo, you can if you've been doing it for years, and the problem is a simple one, like this one.