A tip I got from a friend who recently had his mobile phone get wet and talked to a repair geek:
If your phone (or, I imagine, other electronic gadget) gets wet, let it dry for a week before turning it on.
For one thing, the board soaks up water. For another thing, there are layers of copper in there, and they will oxidize if electricity goes through while it is wet.
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Boards are made of fiberglass, basically the same stuff they make boats with so, no, boards don't soak water.
There are however lots and lots of tiny gaps where water can get trapped, and since there is little or no air circulation inside a closed housing, this can indeed take a long time to dry out.
This kind of situation became a real problem since the ban on CFCs, because boards are no longer cleaned after soldering (they used to be soaked in freon for cleaning).
Instead of dealing with the somewhat toxic alternatives to freon, so-called "no-clean" solder fluxes were developed. A solder flux is a compound that becomes acidic when heated, so it strips off copper oxide to allow for good solder joints to form. A no-clean flux simply hardens upon cooling down, effectively stopping its corrosive action. Problem is, when it gets wet, it becomes acidic again, and becomes conductive too.
Re-activating the flux like this can have disastrous effects on any component that has very thin conductive films, such as an LCD. The longer the flux remains active, the higher the chances of permanent and irreversible damage. So it's a good idea to remove as much of the housing as you can, and speed up the drying by any other means available. However, hair driers are not always a good idea, as they can generate a lot of static electricity.
As I said, the flux (which pretty much covers the board(s)) is partly conductive while wet. Therefore, attempting to use the device before it has fully dried can pretty much short out everything on the board. Something to be avoided too.
Bottom line: don't go swimming with your iPhone. And if you do, take out the battery ASAP, it's a matter of seconds.
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