How to make sure your phone doesn’t get hot in the summer

An overheated phone is something you want to avoid — it can affect your device’s performance, degrade your battery, and even cause permanent damage to your phone (and everything in its immediate area). As we enter the summer months, spending more time out, increases the risk of your phone going from hot to dangerously hot.

You’d be taking care of yourself when it’s really hot (we hope), so make sure you take care of your smartphone too. There are some particular scenarios to watch out for when it comes to your phone overheating, as well as some tricks you can use to protect yourself and cool down your device when needed.

How to know when your phone is overheating

A good place to start is to know the safe operating temperature for your phone, information the manufacturer should make available somewhere on the web: For iPhones, is between 32F and 95F (i.e. 0C to 35C). Whether you’re at the beach or in your car, this gives you an idea of ​​just how hot it is.

There are other scenarios where the phone can overheat or get even hotter. Depending on your phone, this could happen when streaming or recording videos, charging (especially via wireless charging), or playing apps or games that place great strain on the phone and its processor. As devices get older, these issues tend to get worse.

Turn-by-turn navigation using GPS is another intensive activity that can heat up a phone pretty quickly and considering it may be charging at the same time, and even in direct sunlight (through your car’s windshield), it’s one scenario that you should keep an eye on especially in terms of temperature.

Transferring a lot of data over Wi-Fi or cellular networks can also be a heat issue. It means that the communication components in the phone are working extraordinarily, particularly if the signal is weak, in which case the built-in modem has to stay active longer to find and maintain a connection. (This can also have a pretty drastic impact on battery life, by the way).

Most phones occasionally get hot to the touch, particularly when under load, and there’s no exact science to working out when the heat is too hot. In general, long periods of overheating are a concern, as is a phone that gets so hot that you can’t comfortably hold it.

In some cases, your phone will tell you when it’s too hot: For example, iPhones give an alert 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 charge. hot to use. generally. Operations are suspended until the device cools down, although emergency calls can still be made.

How to prevent an overheated phone

Obviously keeping the phone in suitably cool and ventilated environments is a good starting point. If you must take your phone inside a hot building or outdoors on a sunny day, keep it in the shade as much as possible and make sure there is enough room for air to circulate if the air is circulating so the better.

A little common sense goes a long way (for both extreme heat and extreme cold, by the way). Don’t take your phone into the sauna, for example, or leave it in your 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 it every once in a while.

Most manufacturers, including Google, it will tell you to minimize phone activity when your phone is overheating. Ideally, you want to shut it down completely if you don’t want to, quit any apps you’re using, and consider putting your phone on airplane mode (which significantly reduces the amount of work the internal components have to handle).

You also need to move the phone to a cooler, shadier place as soon as possible if it gets too hot. Take it off the charger if it’s charging, and remove the case if your phone has one. If possible, you really want to put your switched off phone in a cool dark corner and leave it alone for an hour or so.

Other ways to ensure your phone does not overheat, like from Samsung, are to keep your operating system and apps up-to-date, ensure a bug-free and efficient software experience, and to use chargers and cables that are officially approved for use with your phone. If your phone always gets hot while charging, it could be due to the equipment you’re using to charge it, not the phone itself.

A phone that constantly and repeatedly overheats, even on cold days, could have something wrong with it like a bad battery. If so, a call to your local repair shop or phone manufacturer may be required, chances are you’ll be able to fix it before something else goes wrong.