Is Humidity Eating Your Phone?
Phone manufactures have carefully worded their water damage terms, claiming the LSIs (Liquid Submergence Indicators) are designed not to be triggered by humidity and temperature changes that are "within the product's environmental requirements. For example " Tech specs for the iPhone indicate an acceptable range of relative humidity between 5-95%, although the conditions must be "non-condensing" . To give you an example, if its 29-degrees outside with a relative humidity of 75% and you exited an air-conditioned building of say 20-degrees and the device was as cold as the building environment, condensation will form causing water droplets to form on any cooled surfaces until its temperature increases to match the outside temperature. Users in cold climates could experience similar conditions if the phone reaches a low temperature outdoors before being brought into a much warmer building.
For residents of many tropical areas, the relative humidity can hover in the upper part of the iPhone's tolerance range for a large portion of the year, and easily reaches past 90-percent during or after a period of rain. Although the generally high humidity and outdoor temperatures may not trigger the LSI, leaving an air- conditioned building can cause condensation on devices.
But these same conditions occur naturally on your body. Say your phone has been sitting on the cold kitchen bench all night, you come out, pick it up and drop it into your pocket to run of and catch the bus, the humidity can be as high as 79% in your pocket due to natural evaporation from the skin and human body temperature is 36-degrees, you do the maths. Now this may only be for a small amount of time but when you add this together over weeks and months, it soon adds up to be enough to trigger the LSIs or to cause corrosion within the device. Now I know what your saying, (but my phone is in a case or I use a neoprene cover), yes this offers great protection from scratches but does nothing to protect it from Humidity and water, infact if you are exercising with your phone or iPod in one of those neoprene cases, you may be actually increasing the risk of damage due to the amount of sweat retained by the pouch and the heat of your body can increase humidity around your device to as much as 95%!
Thats like standing out in the middle of the rain.
