I'm a little late, but I finally picked the best
Smartphone horror story. The stories were entertaining, in a horrifying way, and I ended up picking two winners because both were so great. Each person will receive a Smartphone Thoughts micro light and a $30 gift certificate for Amazon.com. Here's the first one, from
jctune:
"When Microsoft Smartphone 2002 was all the rage, I left my well cared for SPV100 on the hood of my truck. I drove from home to the hardware store and back - and when I got home I realized what I had done. Luckily, the hardware store isn't very far from my house - so I traced my steps and found the pieces of my phone scattered about the first intersection. The phone was in four pieces, the battery door, the battery, the phone itself, and the SIM card/SIM card holder. Luckily there were no scratches on the screen, and no one had run over the phone as it sat in the intersection for about 15 minutes (residential streets - probably only a couple of cars every 5 minutes). Put it back together again and it worked just fine. The only thing that broke was one of the little nubs that attached the SIM card holder door to the phone. This was before these phones were available in the US - I had bought this one as soon as Arne at ppcw.net started selling them."
The next story is from
kkauffman and involves a hot tub...
"I've got a 2GB card on my SP5m WM5 phone and have it loaded down with a ton of music. One night I took it to the hottub to relax and listen to some tunes. Long story short, the cord got caught on my elbow as I changed positions and the phone got pulled into the hottub.
I quickly removed it, but it was under for a good 7 seconds or so. The screen had a really cool puddle in front of it and I freaked. Unfortunately my buddy was borrowing my special tool set that had the screwdriver that would have allowed me to open the phone up and dry it out immediately--and properly. Alas, all I could do is place it on the floor in front of the refrigerator so that the warm exhaust from the fridge would (hopefully) evaporate the water.
The next morning the phone powered up, the blob was mostly gone, but 30% of the keys/joystick didn't work. I decided to turn on the WiFi since that tends to generate a lot of heat--and hoped it would further evaporate out the water. It worked--by 2PM or so the functionality of all the keys returned. Unfortunately over the next week I noticed that my phone discharged _extremely_ quick...after a full day of use I used to have 80% battery remaining--now I was having about 20% battery remaining.
I disassembled the phone and took a toothbrush to gingerly "scrub" the circuit boards in case some small particle was causing the phone to discharge. Re-assembled, popped it on the charger and tested it the next day. It's been 6 months since that fateful run-in with the hottub and my phone is as good today as it was the day I got it."
Thanks to everyone for sharing! The winners should check their forum inbox for a message from me.
Log in to check your private messages -> Log in 
