Does your smartphone overheat more often than usual? The causes could be various, but the solutions are pretty standard. Here’s how to cool it down
Most likely in summer or even in the hottest days of spring and autumn, you’ve experienced a very unpleasant phenomenon: your smartphone (or even tablet) overheats and, in extreme cases, freezes. If you’re wondering why this phenomenon occurs, you should know that there can be more than one reason for it and the solutions are often the same.
A smartphone can overheat because it is placed under the sun or in contact with a very hot surface, which transmits heat to it, or because it is running very heavy applications for too long consecutively. If the reason for the overheating is not among the first two, then we recommend that you take the device to a service center to find and fix the defect.
Smartphone overheats in the sun
Specially in summer, it happens that a smartphone or tablet overheats due to high external temperatures. If placed in the July or August sun, a cell phone can become glowing in less than twenty minutes. If it’s black, gray or dark blue, it’s even more likely. In the most serious cases, the smartphone freezes and stops working or even shuts down: it’s a safety mechanism built in by manufacturers to avoid further stress to the battery (the component that is most at risk with heat, even to explode) or to the rest of the hardware. Such a situation can also happen if we leave the phone in the car, under the sun, or if we take it to a very hot place.
Smartphone overheats while you use it
The second typical case of smartphone overheating has nothing to do with external temperatures, but is nevertheless favored by them: if put under pressure by an application very demanding in terms of CPU and/or RAM, then the phone can heat up abnormally. Electronic components generate heat as they work, so the more you ask of your smartphone’s CPU, the hotter it will respond. Compared to a desktop PC or even a laptop, a smartphone also has far less surface area available to dissipate all this heat. If you’re in the middle of an intense gaming session or if you’ve been watching streaming videos for several tens of minutes, then your phone could reach critical temperatures. A case apart, but with identical outcomes, is the poorly designed app: in this case the app unnecessarily requires the processor to do several work cycles that put it under stress, leading to overheating.
How to cool an overheated smartphone
If a smartphone gets overheated, for whatever reason, the methods to cool it are always the same:
1) close all applications
2) turn off the smartphone
3) put it in a cooler place for at least 15 minutes (if you’re at the beach put it under the umbrella or under the tablecloth, if you’re at home you can also put it for about ten minutes in the freezer, but no more)
4) when the smartphone returns to normal temperature turn it back on and avoid the causes that had led to overheating
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