I came across my old phone that I'd washed while cleaning my room. It works fine now! Only thing missing is on it is my old contact list. Even my pictures are all still there! I'm a little suspicious that the contact list actually got erased when people at the store were trying to retrieve it: they tried several things and in the end seemed very confident that it was gone ;) But then again, perhaps it just happened to be the one thing that gets erased with washing. The feature still works: I was able to save a test number.

In any event, as far as the hardware and original software goes, I guess it just needed a lot of time to dry out!