Water doom: yet another reason why integral batteries are a terrible idea

Water. A point which was brought home to me (again) this week, with a family Blackberry and a family iPad both being accidentally dunked in basins of water. In the Blackberry's case, it was fairly trivial to simply remove the battery and put the whole device in the airing cupboard for 24 hours. Stick the battery in and everything booted up fine.  As I write this, the iPad is still undergoing emergency surgery... 8-)

I remember several smartphones of Rafe's which ended up falling in his local stream. In each case, removing the battery and letting everything dry out restored the phone to operation. 

With a 'modern' sealed unit, you're utterly at the mercy of the conductivity and corrosivity of whatever liquid got spilled on your smartphone or whatever it got dunked in. No chance to yank out the battery, which means that you'll have the full battery voltage trying to create all sorts of nasrty short circuits and electro-chemical reactions inside the phone, with no chance to stop the damage. You just have to sit there and pray. And, probably, visit a repair centre and empty your wallet.

With this in mind, I'd like to add to the table in the original article:

	Sealed batteries (e.g. in Apple iPhone, Nokia E7, X7, Nokia Lumia 800, HTC Radar)	(Traditional) Replaceable batteries (e.g. Nokia N95, N97, E6, 808 PureView, Lumia 710, HTC HD7)
Advantages	Batteries can be custom designed/shaped to fit around other internal components, leading to greater volume and greater charge capacity. With no battery door, latch or sprung battery contacts, the phone can be simpler in construction and stronger. There's no possibility of the user putting in third party 'dodgy' batteries and thus compromising the rest of the phone's performance or risking fire etc.	In the event of contact with water, you can remove the battery to avoid electrochemical damage. In addition, the physical act of removal helps open up the phone massively, helping 'air' the hardware and dry it out. Every chance of a full recovery. Batteries can be sourced relatively inexpensively, kept as spares in a pocket and swapped in and out as needed. When a battery's capacity has degraded significantly, you can just throw it away (safely) and buy/insert a new one.  In the event of serious software or hardware malfunction, you can 'pull' the battery to drain charge from the device and then restart it from scratch. Where safe to do so, third party batteries can be used to provide higher capacity within the same form factor.
Disadvantages	When the battery's flat, there's no alternative but to charge the phone directly, via mains, USB or a portable charger. When the battery's capacity has significantly decreased/degraded, you have to take the phone to an approved service centre and pay whatever the manufacturer demands to get the battery replaced. On a long, demanding day out, you can't take a 'spare' battery (just in case). In the event of a dunking in water or (a worse) liquid, there's no way to remove the battery to prevent electrochemical damage. A repair centre visit (or replacement) is almost inevitable.	Battery tends to be smaller and capacity tends to be lower, due to the volume needed for the sprung contacts, support struts, battery door, latch, etc.  Batteries have to be (roughly) of standard shape, for ease of insertion and storage. You have to watch out for third party 'counterfeit' batteries, which may not provide what they say and may even be dangerous.

 

Yes, perhaps I'm being a little pessimistic, but which of us hasn't had some water-electronics contact of some kind? Do you have any success or disaster stories to share here? What have you brought to life or destroyed?