Avoiding an overheating phone is crucial due to its potential consequences, such as compromising device performance, damaging the battery, and even causing permanent harm to the phone and nearby objects. With the summer months approaching and increased outdoor activities, the likelihood of your phone becoming excessively hot becomes higher.
Just as you take care of yourself in hot weather, it’s important to extend that care to your smartphone. To prevent overheating and cool down your device when necessary, be mindful of specific situations and employ some useful techniques.
Recognizing when your phone is overheating is a good starting point. Manufacturers typically provide information about the safe operating temperature range for their phones, which can usually be found on their website. For example, iPhones have a safe range between 32ºF and 95ºF (0ºC to 35ºC). By being aware of these limits, you can determine if your phone has become too hot, whether you’re at the beach or inside a vehicle.
Various scenarios can lead to your phone heating up or becoming even hotter. Depending on the specific device, this can occur during video streaming or recording, while charging (especially through wireless methods), or when using demanding apps or games that place a significant burden on the phone’s processor. As devices age, these issues often become more pronounced.
An additional intensive task that can rapidly increase your phone’s temperature is using GPS for step-by-step navigation. In this situation, it’s crucial to monitor the temperature carefully since the phone may be simultaneously charging and exposed to direct sunlight through your car’s windshield.
Transferring a lot of data over Wi-Fi or cellular networks can be a problem in terms of heat too. It means the communication components in the handset are working overtime—particularly if the signal is a weak one, in which case the built-in modem has to stay more active for longer to find and keep a connection. (This can also have a rather drastic impact on battery life, by the way).
Most phones will occasionally get warm to the touch—particularly when under strain—and there’s no exact science for working out when hot is too hot. In general, extended periods of overheating are a concern, and so is a phone that’s overheating to the extent that you can’t comfortably hold it in your hand.
In some cases, your phone will tell you when it’s too warm: For example, iPhones throw up a warning when they’re too hot to charge safely, when restoring from an iCloud backup has pushed the temperature too high, and when they’re too hot to use in general. Operations are paused until the device cools, though emergency calls can still be made.
How to prevent an overheated phone
Obviously, keeping your phone in environments that are suitably cooled and ventilated is a good starting point. If you have to take your handset inside into a warm building, or out into a sunny day, keep it in the shade as much as possible, and make sure there’s plenty of room for air to travel around it—if that air is circulating, so much the better.
A little bit of common sense goes a long way (both for extreme heat and extreme cold, incidentally). Don’t take your phone into the sauna, for example, or leave it in a car on a hot day. If you’re charging your phone, make sure it’s away from a window and in a cool part of the room, and check on it every so often.
Most manufacturers, including Google, will tell you to keep phone activity down to a minimum when a phone is overheating. Ideally, you want to turn it off completely—if you don’t want to do that, quit out of any apps you’re running, and consider putting your phone in airplane mode (which significantly reduces how much work the internal components have to handle).
You also need to move the phone to a cooler and shadier spot as soon as possible, if it’s become too hot. Take it off its charger if it’s charging, and remove the case if your phone has one—some cases are great at protecting handsets, but not so great at keeping them cool, and this can be a factor. If possible, you really want to put your switched off phone in a dark and cool corner and leave it alone for an hour or so.
Other ways to ensure your phone doesn’t overheat, as per Samsung, are to keep the operating system and your apps right up to date—ensuring an efficient, bug-free software experience—and to use chargers and cables that are officially approved for use with your phone. If your phone always overheats while it’s charging, it might be because of the equipment you’re using to charge it, not the phone itself.
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