iPhone 3GS has underwater video recording? Don’t count on it

Let’s face it. Some of us can get a little clumsy and spill liquid onto our gadgets. Perhaps you’ve toppled a glass of beer into your lap while your phone was in your pocket. Or maybe you wanted to change your tunes and had an MP3 player slip and fall onto something wet. The bottom line is that those gadgets rarely, if ever, survive moist conditions. So, how can anyone expect a cell phone to work after dropping it into a swimming pool? A video depicting a man casually recording a beautiful day at the pool shows just that. Or does it?

Like all wildly outrageous videos and images, this particular video has made quick rounds on the Internet – shocking, and unfortunately inspiring, iPhone owners who were always curious. But once you get over the “wow factor,” skepticism and reality begin to sink in. Why does his commentary sound awkward leading up to the drop – as if he were anticipating something soon? Why on earth would he hold an expensive new phone so precariously over a swimming pool? Did anyone else notice the wrist strap that makes a very brief appearance in the video as he pulls the “phone” out of the water? Why wasn’t that secured to, oh, I don’t know, his wrist? (Off the top of my head, I am not familiar with cases for the iPhone which feature wrist straps.) With everyone wanting to test out the upload-straight-to-YouTube feature on the iPhone, why wasn’t this video loaded that way? The video length is short enough that it would have only taken a minute or two.

If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. I’m not going to completely dismiss this one as false, but the probability that the video was recorded by an iPhone is rather low. Water entering the earpiece, speaker, microphone and 32-pin connecter would have rendered any other iPhone practically useless. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that show the likelihood of water damage survival is small. Here’s the lesson to take home: if you plan on going scuba diving any time soon, don’t take your iPhone (or any other non-waterproof device) with you.