Hi,
My Blackberry works now!
The good news is that a 10 minute immersion in distilled water (drugstore variety distilled water), including shaking, swishing, and jiggling, then quick drying with paper towels, followed immediately by a 2 hours in my oven preheated to about 150 degrees F (oven turned off and temperature before Blackberry inserted in oven) even before I removed the Blackberry from the water, to minimize oxygen exposure to a wet electronic circuit board. To maintain heat, I intermittently turned on the oven for 10 seconds while my hand was inside the oven as a control to make sure it was never too hot to keep my hand in the oven. I did not use any denatured alcohol or 97% isopropyl alcohol
-- although that would have been my next step (I had a difficult time finding denatured alcohol, which affected my decision to try just distilled water first.) Although it is true there is oxygen content in the distilled water, I am told it is supposed to not be nearly as corrosive as as other types of water (like tap water) and keeping it underwater in relatively cool much purer water for only 10 minutes probably won't do more damage than the damage already done in the first place by the contaminants of dropping into a dirty puddle that got it broken in the first place..
I was going to wait 24 hours, but the blackberry seemed fully dry after 10 minutes, so I continued. After about 3 hours, I reassembled the Blackberry cellphone and it WORKED!
So now I'm a happy camper. There is a minor stain in the backlighting (I removed the LCD and the thumb keyboard and put them aside before immersing the circuit board in the water), and the thumb keyboard seems a little well-used, but that's mostly it. I have activated the Blackberry now.
Thanks to all the people who gave me advice, which almost always mentioned distilled water as a washing step, usually alongside another agent as a rinsing step (i.e. denatured alcohol). Except for a couple of advice.
So next time, if something is possibly not worth repairing through any other means, and the defect is a short circuit somewhere (i.e. stuck buttons), then a distilled water bath followed by low-temperature oven is the ideal route that avoids permanent banishment to a junk drawer....! For me at least.
I'll probably try denatured alcohol, if I could easily find some locally -- may have to go further to a big place such as a Home Depot somewhere in the suburbs.
Mark Rejhon