Can That Watch, Speaker and Phone Really Survive A Dunking?

Are waterproof gadgets as impervious to liquid as they claim? T3 hits the drink to find out

- Chris Barnes

Only a few years back, an accidentally submerged gadget meant a race to the kitchen to find a bag of rice, before burying the device in a bowl of potentially tech-saving grains. What came next was a prayer to the grain gods, followed by an anxious wait to power up and see if you’d saved your gadget from watery doom. If you were unlucky, you’d be looking at a pricey replacement.

Thankfully times have changed, and many of the latest gadgets now come with a degree of waterproofing as standard. The question is, just how waterproof are they? Can we really WhatsApp safely from a banana boat, or read an ebook in the bath, turning the page with foamy fingers?

DEEP IMPACT

To find out how waterproof your tech is, look for the IP rating (found in the spec). This dictates how deep the gadget can be submerged and for how long. I want to send a selection of every day, IP-rated gadgets to the bottom of the T3 testing pool to see if they really are waterproof. Sadly the pool is closed for maintenance, so instead I fill a fish tank with icy water. On the coldest day of the year. My hands will love this.

One of the most common tech casualties is the phone down the toilet, so I’m pulling out the big guns for test number one (or should that be number two? Sorry). The Google Pixel 3 XL – designed with 6.3-inch QHD+ OLED display and robust Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection – is a sizeable beast in the hand. With a price tag starting from `83,000, it’s not something you’d want to lose to water damage. An IP68 waterproof rating means the Pixel 3 XL should withstand submersion to a depth of 1.5m for up to 30 minutes. Let’s see if can withstand our tank…