our tips to avoid overheating your smartphone
The first summer heat waves arrive and with them the temperature rises. Heat can be a great ally or a great enemy, depending on the person, although when it comes to smartphones, the further it is from our smartphone, the better.
The sun has set for a few days, for a period of heat wave where the temperature will be around 40 degrees. For individuals, the advice is simple: remember to hydrate yourself regularly, stay in the shade and avoid physical activity. But, for smartphones, it is also better to take some wise precautions to avoid overheating…
You may have come across this mobile user who, early in the morning, in a boiling bus, saw his smartphone reboot: it was not a bug but a heat problem that his phone could not manage. And, to avoid this kind of inconvenience, which ranges from safety blockage to damage to internal components in the long term, it is better to play the card of caution and limit the causes of overheating.
Limit heavy apps
Snapdragon, Exynos or Apple, make no mistake, all processors heat up and can cause some inconvenience in summer. Indeed, certain uses, such as games, permanent activation of the GPS or even the recording of videos in 4K tend to increase the heating of the telephones.
It is also a good idea to close applications running in the background and consuming energy, such as geolocation applications (Google Maps, Waze, etc.) or social networks (Facebook in particular) which work in the background, consume energy and therefore emit heat. Also note that it is better to avoid pushing the brightness of your screen to the maximum, the backlight making its small contribution to the overall heating of smartphones.
Be careful in car
In the car, where the smartphone is likely to live its most difficult hours, it goes without saying that it is not advisable to put it on the dashboard, behind a windshield which would increase the heat tenfold. It is also better, if you use it as a GPS, to avoid leaving it plugged in at the same time: charging a phone naturally makes it heat up, especially in the case of fast charging, and it is not prudent to accumulate the causes of heating. If you need to charge the smartphone while using the GPS, prefer slow charging at 1 amp.
Shade
Outside the car, try not to keep your phone in your trouser pocket, but rather in a bag, where it will be better ventilated. If you’re lucky enough to spend the hottest hours of the day basking on the sand, remember to take an insulated pouch with you to place your phone in, so that it doesn’t simmer while you heal. your tan. If you are not equipped, reserve a small corner of shade for your phone. Likewise, it is better to remove the protective shell — especially if it is plastic — to improve heat dissipation.
When you take a few photos on your vacation, play a few games of a demanding game like Diablo Immortal, or just use the phone for several hours, if it has a case, it will get warmer than without it. It is therefore advisable to remove this, at least when you are going to have intensive use.
With fast charges, the phone will heat up a lot. It’s not a bad idea to keep your mobile cool while charging., on the ground for example. It’s a trick that can make you smile, but we can assure you that the temperature will stay much lower… so avoid leaving it on the bed or any other surface with a higher temperature.
What are the risks associated with overheating?
Heating is not an electronic component’s best friend. Admittedly, they are designed to reach extremely high temperatures, we are talking about more than 100°C for certain components, but this is not necessarily a good idea in the long term. Especially since within a smartphone, there are many components, all as different from each other with each their specificity. It is therefore necessary to avoid heating the assembly. In a smartphone, the two elements that heat up the most are the charging battery and the SoC, which notably includes the processor and the graphics chip.
As we mentioned in our dossier dedicated to batteries, their cells do not like heat very much and the batteries thus lose more of their capacity when they face high temperatures. To maintain the good autonomy of your smartphone, it is therefore better to keep its battery cool.
If your mobile is already too hot, the best solution is to turn it off and avoid any nearby heat source. As it turns off, the phone will gradually reduce its temperature. Do not try to put it in the refrigerator or try solutions that suddenly lower the temperaturebecause a sudden change in the temperature of the components can damage it.
In short, the solution for mobile temperature is to prevent rather than cure. While it’s completely normal for a smartphone to get hotter in the summer, following some of these tips can be a good preventative measure to avoid overheating.
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