Many years ago, a good friend of mine dropped his Nokia 3110 in the snow outside his parents house. We lived way up in the arctic then, and we couldn't find it.
So we basically assumed it was gone forever.
Later we found out that it had gotten frozen in the snow, and covered with a huge snowpile. His dad found the phone when he ran over it with his snowblower. It got sucked into the snowblower, blown maybe 20 yards away and landed in anoter pile of snow. His dad wondered what the clunk was and found the phone.
We thawed it out, plugged it in the charger and it lit up just as new. It had been frozen in ice/snow for maybe four months, gone through a snowblower and then thawed out and the only visible damage to it was a small chunk taken out of the plastic casing by one of the snowblowers blades.
Same phone was later the following summer accidentally dropped into shallow water in a lake. He dove down after it, let it dry in the sun and it started up just as new again. Only effect of a dip in the lake was that the numberpad squeaked for a few days afterwards.
The thing that almost killed it was a three-story drop onto concrete. The phone survived with some superficial damage to the casing and a distorted frame, but you could still use it. However the display got smashed in the fall and that made it quite useless so he retired it.