Hello everyone,
In conclusion, my question is: If water enters my Xperia Z, but not through the ports, and destroys my phone. Is there anything I can do?
Here's the longer story to explain what happened and potentially warn people from ending up like me:
I have probably never taken better care of a phone as I did with my Xperia Z. I have owned it for about 9 months.
However I did never hesitate to let it get wet. I never submerged it in a pool or anything, but rain, a quick flush, etc. I never gave it a thought since it's a water proof phone and I always double check the ports are closed.
- Since I use the desktop charger I rarely had to open the ports as well.
Anyway, the other day I took the phone with me into the shower because I was in a hurry to read some e-mails. Later that day I noticed there was water vapor under the camera glass. By discovering this, I immediately turned the phone off and threw it in a bucket of rice. Reading on these forums I learned I could see "where water entered" by the indicators that turn red. The USB port indicator had turned red, **bleep** it - I assumed it was my own fault not closing the port.
By my luck, after 4-5 days in the rice bucket I turned the phone back on and it was working (almost) flawlessly (the proximity sensor was acting a bit weird tho). By reading on these forums I was suggested to leave a little piece of water detection paper on top of the already red one, close all ports, triple check and then gave it a dip. No water entered any ports, I was happy.
- Half an hour later the phone was acting all weird. I did not understand it until I saw water again under the camera glass, so water HAD entered but NOT through the ports!
At this point the lock/power button was not working. I wanted to turn off the phone, but I couldn't. Press and holding the button did a restart rather than showing me the menu on screen to turn off. Also, when the phone went into sleep mode, there was no waking it up by pressing the unlock/power button - doing a reset by holding the button would turn the screen back on, functioning, but once the screen goes dark it stays dark. I could use a second phone to call it, the screen would wake up and be functioning. Ok, so it just wouldn't be turned off, I threw it in a bucket of rice again and let it stay for a week.
Today I took the phone back out and it's still unusable by this behavior, so nothing changed after drying it out.
My phone barely has a scratch, I feel I have taken very good care of it and felt this was a quality product making me feel like a Sony fanboy. So I don't understand how and why this has happened.
What could I do now? If I was to pay my local phone repair shop to fix it; I wouldn't. It will be expensive and I still couldn't trust the phone to be water proof. Honestly, if this is a general fault Sony should admit it and replace the broken phone. I would be OK with keeping a replacement phone away from water, but I am quite disappointed with being left without a phone right now, since Sony warranty does not cover water damage???
