I had a bottle of water in my bag along with my wallet, camera, iphone and other crap. The water bottle split. The lid was securely on, but the seam of the water bottle split. Water everywhere. Apparently my leather Coach bag holds water. No drips nothing. I wouldn't even have known the water bottle had broken except I went to grab mints and my hand went into about 2" of water. Great. I was in the middle of a shopping mall. I stopped right where I was and emptied my bag. Out came everything. Then I dumped all the water into a rubbish bin. I sales girl from the Barnes & Noble store brought out some towels for me. She helped me dry everything off.
Then we noticed water in the screens of my camera and iPhone. Crap. Lots of water. Sloshing round inside the screen. The iPhone had this message on the screen. Not good considering I wasn't using any accessories.
I powered the iPhone off and took out the SIM card. I took the battery and SD card out of the camera. That was all I could do at the time. (oh yeah, the girl from Barnes and Noble also gave me an iced tea and a chocolate chip cookie. Must remember to send feedback).
On the way back to the hotel I stopped at Fred Meyer's and bought ziplock bags and rice. I put the iPhone in one bag and the camera in another and covered them in rice. They stayed there until I got home 24 hours later.
I could still see water in the screens, so I left in them rice for another 24 hours. I moved them from ziplock bags to square containers. For no other reason than to make me feel like I was doing something.
The camera is still in it's container full of rice. I don't think it's going to be saved. The iPhone? Appears to be okay. Everything I read on the interwebs says to leave it for a week. Yeah, I'm not that patient. I took it out of the rice this afternoon and charged it. It seems to be working. I've sent emails and texts. Although I haven't had responses, so not sure if they went through. The camera on the iphone is the only thing that seems to be shoddy. Any photo I take is really grainy, I know they're only phone photos but they never used to be that bad.
In my research, here are some other suggestions for drying out your iPhone (or any phone or electronics).
Fill a ziplock bag with silica gel packets. They're usually in shoe boxes etc. Keep them. Better than rice, because rice has a fine dust that you have to clean out of all the nooks and crannies.
Blast with a hairdryer - not a good idea, you want to dry out the phone not fry it.
Soak it in 90%+ alcohol.
Use a Bheestie Bag. Hubby has one of these somewhere, but not sure where it is.