It means that most of what's inside the phone is damaged and you need a new phone. 5-10 minutes swishing around in dirty water is too late to do anything to save a phone. If it gets wet, and you can IMMEDIATELY get it out of the water and get the battery out (within a few seconds), you can rinse the phone in alcohol (plain old rubbing alcohol) for about 5 minutes to get all the dirt and minerals (from the water) off the insides of the phone. Change the alcohol and re-rinse twice, so it gets cleaned 3 times. Wipe the battery down with alcoho,. (Most of most batteries are plastic, but the metal contacts, and any other exposed metal parts, can corrode.)

THEN put the phone and battery into a closed container (like a jar with a crew top) of uncooked rice for about a week. No guarantees - even a shop won't guarantee to fix a wet phone - but that at least gives you a fair chance of saving the phone.

(Put a phone into alcohol? Yes. Alcohol is hygroscopic. Not only isn't it water, it absorbs water, so it'll dry the phone.)

 

Means it's really damaged.

Too late! That needed to be done BEFORE you turned it back on.

I had a similar accident with my S3 last week -- but having read about water damage problems, I did the following:
1) immediately opened it and pulled the battery
2) wrapped the phone in a facecloth and put it in the dryer, on low heat, on a platform that did not rotate.
3) Ran for only one minute, took phone out, let it cool down.
4) Repeated steps 2 & 3 for 30 minutes
5) Unwrapped phone, took a can of compressed air and blew into all the openings in the case
6) Stuck phone (face down) under a desk lamp (generating heat) for eight hours
7) Let phone sit open all night -- not under heat
8) Connected battery next day (24 hours after incident). Phone turned on and worked OK.

But, it was only in the washer for 5 minutes or less and was in a case that covered most of the phone.

Some will say I was lucky to get it working again -- and they would be right.

 

OK my 1 year old daughter decided my S2 4G LTE phone was a piece of CRAP and threw it in the toilet.

1) I immediately took the battery out and let it sit in front of a fan for 1 hour standing up so the water would drain out.
2) Make sure you try and get all water out.
3) I took the shell off just where the battery, sim card and the sd card is and remember to put them in safe keeping cause the screws are tiny.
4) Then put the phone in a container filled with rice, its best to put a lid on the container aswell...I didn't put the battery in just the device and keep it in there for 2 to 3 days.
5) Put the phone back together and turn it on, you may have to hold the power on button till it lights up and its good to go.

I was curious to see if it still worked after falling into the toilet so before putting it in the rice I turned it on and I couldn't play music, Bluetooth wasn't working and couldn't connect to WiFi. BUT!!!
After pulling it out of the rice everything was working fine.

It really does work! I think the rice absorbs the moisture maybe but DO try this next time your phone decides to go for another swim.