Q: What should I do if I dropped my iPhone in water?

Turn your phone off & try don't try switching it on...doing so "may" short things out. You can "try" putting the phone in a ziploc bag of dried rice...Silica Gel Pacs work best... for 3 ~ 5 days, then hope things work. Apple does have an out of warranty replacement program, & the cost for an iPhone 4 is US $149.

Use the rice now, then get the Silica Pacs.

You should turn it off and make sure it's completely dried out.  If there water somewhere in it and it shifts around, it could cause major damage to the iPhone.

I thought I would post some replies to the 'wet, nonworking iphone' discussions to encourage others to wait a bit and to dry out their phones for a longer period of time. Last Wed. afternoon I got my iphone wet and thought it was fine because it still worked, however, a couple hours later it was dead.  I made the mistake of recharging then and also started trying to restore, but got nothing but hardware start up error messages on the phone and the dreaded 4013 or 4005 in iTunes.  I tried several times a day to restore with the same result.  In between, I put the phone in a bag of rice.  I think the advice elsewhere to power down and dry thoroughly is the best advice and I did not follow it because I already thought I was doomed.

I was going to go to Apple/ATT today - Monday - to get a new phone, but we had another snow dump so I'm housebound.  With nothing to lose, I pulled the phone out of the rice this morning and it restored!  I've lost a bunch of pix and some contacts that were not backed up, but I've not lost months of of spending on my 2 yr. contract without having a working phone.

So, if your phone gets wet, don't give up right away.  It took almost 6 days for my phone to dry out.

Good luck to anyone else who has this problem.