Eli5: How are phones waterproof even though the charging port terminals can be exposed to water and not short circuit them?
In: 4320
As others said “water resistant”.
But for the ports, there’s a few tricks the most commonly used is to have moisture detection in the port. This is pretty trivial, basically you have a circuit that measures capacitance and if that circuit detects a change in capacitance (there’s a big difference between the capacitance of air and water) then the phone will disable the port as well as the ability to charge the phone until that’s no longer the case.
No power in the port means no short circuits.
Of course, your ports are still vulnerable to corrosion from exposure to water but the components in a phone are decently resistant to corrosion.
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