Are You Facing Smartphone Overheating Issue? Here's All You Need to Know to Prevent It

Why Smartphones Heat Up?

Remember your high school physics? Movement generates heat! Well, your smartphone has to move things around physically to work and so it generates heat. The amount of heat that is produced by your smartphone is proportional to the amount of electricity that is moving around the device. If you are playing a high intensity game that has huge CPU requirements, the SoC gets warm and generates heat. So, heating up is normal, but overheating is a concern.

Overheating of Smartphones Is a Concern

SoCs are well optimized to handle high temperatures that are used in smartphones and overheating becomes an issue in rare cases only. When your smartphone reaches a potentially harmful temperature, the SoC will reduce the processor speed that will slow down the operating speed as it is one sign of overheating. In case of severe scenarios, a warning will be displayed and it will prevent you from using the handset till it has cooled down.

Reasons for Frequent Overheating

In case, your smartphone is experiencing frequent overheating, it could be due to a slew of solvable reasons and most of these will be related to overloading of the hardware. The quickest way to overheat your phone is pushing the GPU for too long. The other reason could be due to the use of demanding apps as the same will put a lot of burden on the CPU. The other reasons are multi-tasking, use of widgets, extra features, connectivity, etc. as these require the processing power that will heat up the battery.

External Factors of Overheating

The overheating of your smartphone is not restricted to the usage of the device alone. Sometimes, even external factors such as placing the device in direct sunlight for a long time could result in overheating. If you don't overexert the device, and still it overheats, then it could point out at a hardware malfunction.

Damage Done to the Battery

There are Li-Ion batteries in the modern smartphones as these are the best rechargeable batteries that are available for now. However, there are limitations with these as well. The first point to be noted is that the Li-Ion batteries degrade even when they are not in use. This happens quite slowly and there shouldn't be an issue in using the smartphone for a couple of years. The other point is that such batteries are highly sensitive to heat. Even a temperature of 30 degree centigrade is enough to give a negative image to the battery. The impact is negative as it will speed up the degradation and it reduce the capacity of the battery leaving you with a dead battery soon.

Avoid Overheating of Battery

The worst thing is to expose your phone to heat when it is fully charged. So, it is bad to charge it to 100 percent. You are stressing your battery by charging it to 100 percent regularly. Even discharging has an effect on the battery life, so never let it run down to zero percent. It is ideal to keep it charged somewhere between 30 percent to 80 percent. The only issue is that you will have to increase the charge cycles.

SoC and Overheating

The processor speed will actually be throttled to prevent overheating and this will slow down your device and sometimes it might become unusable too. Too much of heat can even damage the chip physically, but this is only in rare cases.

Prevent or Manage SoC Overheating

You can prevent or manage the overheating of the SoC by stop playing demanding games and watching videos for longer durations as such activities will require a lot of the processor's power.