Expel water from your iPhone speaker grille using only sound

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iPhone 7 soaked in water
A crafty Redditor discovers a simple and free way to clear trapped water from your iPhone 7's speaker grille.
Photo: Apple

Apple touts the new iPhone 7 as being water-resistant enough to take into the shower. There’s really no good reason to bathe with your smartphone, but the point is that iPhone 7 owners don’t need to worry about a little rain or spilled tea.

Naturally, some people waltzed into their shower stalls with their expensive new phones in hand — just cuz — and some found a weakness in the iPhone 7’s water-resistance. Luckily for foolhardy iPhone owners everywhere, a Redditor discovered a simple hack for getting the water out.

Turns out the iPhone’s speaker grille, designed to keep water out, can keep water inside if the liquid manages to get through. But all you need to get it out is a free sound-generating app called Sonic.

“I found the resonant frequency of the water in the grille to be around 165 Hz,” Redditor PointlessPankcake says in the post. “While the tone is playing, you will see little drops or bubbles bouncing out of the speaker, take a piece of absorbent material and dab them up as they come out of the speaker grille.”

Apple built a similar water-repelling feature into the new Apple Watch Series 2, which is designed to work for swimmers. A teensy sensor in Apple’s newest wearable detects the presence of moisture in the speaker cavity, then emits a sound that makes it do a spit-take.

Why Apple didn’t build the same thing into its flagship phone is a bit of a mystery. Until Cupertino ships a speaker-clearing tone generator in the next iOS update, it’s nice to know there’s a DIY solution.

Of course, you could also just leave your iPhone out of the shower.

Via: BGR

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