Fast Five: Tips to Avoid Smartphone Overheating

Overheating happens on a number of devices as a result of prolonged and excessive stress on the phone’s performance, battery, or a combination, regardless of brand, design, and overall construction. We do care about your phones, and we’re taking you to a few tips you can use to keep your phone in tip-top shape in this Fast Five.

Now all of you may wonder, how in the world the devices overheat? Very simple: it’s the demand of movement in graphic and processing power that heats up your device. You don’t need to worry if it gets warm as it’s normal, but be alarmed when it gets way beyond the normal temperatures. With these pointers, we hope we can help you take care of your precious gadget.

Charge your phone properly (and don’t use it while charging!)

We recommend that you should actually not use it a lot while charging since you’re replenishing and cutting one cycle away from your battery’s life, and excessive overheating shortens the lifespan of your battery. Keep it in a cool place while charging, and it also helps to put it in airplane mode — not only it charges faster, but it also eliminates more heat coming from acquiring wireless signals. It also doesn’t help when charged while in a case, which we’ll explain later on.

Avoid prolonged high-intensity activities

While your phone is capable of playing intensive games or able to do a lot of multitasking, chances are your device’s cores are overworked and thus the heat felt at the back of your phone. While inevitable, we recommend that one should not play too much on the phone and maybe get a dedicated PC or console instead.

Disconnect the wireless connections when idle

You may not use your phone, but there are still background processes that check your connections for data sync every now and then. This, especially when you’ve left your mobile data on for hours even when idle, heats up a phone since there are multiple processes — the phone is looking for a signal for a mobile data connection while background apps are battling to get a priority slot on data and notification sync. Trust us, they eat your data while idle too.

Your Phone case may be the culprit

And here’s the reason why: While it is inevitable on performing tasks on any device, the actual heat gets trapped inside the phone case, unable to get out. When playing intensive games, charging, or even using your phone’s camera at a longer time you normally do (taking videos, for example), remember to keep those cases away for the phone to release all the heat it has inside.

Check your cables and chargers

Lastly, we recommend that you use only cables and batteries that are approved for your device, whether directly from the brand or from third-party makers. There are higher chances of overheating and explosion when you use faulty cables and modded batteries, and such is the case as well for using a charger of higher output than the one recommended for your device.

And that’s it for some tips on keeping your phone healthy by eliminating as much heat. Share more tips in the comments section below, we’d love to hear them out.