Water Can Run Through Your Smartphone With This Coating and Still Work

Many a smartphone has been ruined from taking a dip in the toilet, washing machine, morning cup of joe or a steaming lunchtime bowl of soup. Try as you may to dry out the phone in a bag of rice for a week, it may never turn back on or run at desired capacity again.

Enter Liquipel, a coating -- not a case -- that uses nanotechnology to coat the entire phone without being detectable or interfering with normal function. According to the Liquipel website, it "penetrates the entire device as a whole, including all of the vital components inside and out to provide optimal protection against accidental contact with liquids."

Watch a Liquipel-coated iPhone 4S get doused with a bottle of water:

According to PhysOrg, Liquipel representatives were present at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show where they hoped to make connections with mobile phone makers to have coating pre-applied to devices:

Water will just run through the machine," Liquipel president Danny McPhail told AFP as he casually tossed an iPhone into a tub of water and watched it sink. "It actually beads right on top of the circuit board and rolls off."

[...]

"Hopefully, the next time you purchase a phone it will already be treated," McPhail said.

"Wine spills, coffee spills, anything like that you are going to be protected," he continued. "I don't want to say a toilet, but that is where 50 percent of smartphone water deaths happen."

For now, the technology is available for order through Liquipel for $60 per device. The company states on its website that this coating does not mean you can now take your smartphone scuba diving with you. The coating is only meant to protect the phone in short periods of accidental submersion:

Learn more about the science of behind the nano-coating that is 1,000 times thinner than a human hair:

[H/T Popular Science]