A phone can't deliver maximum performance under heavy load if it risks overheating, which is why heat mitigation is important. Phone makers try to find ways to keep things cool, but they aren't always successful. The Samsung Galaxy S22 series, for example, runs hot. We discovered this in our reviews of the phones, and more broadly the company has gotten into a big controversy over its thermal management practices.
In the past, other phones aside from the Galaxy S22 have had issues with temperature management. In 2019, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset was known for its thermal problems. In 2019, the first generation of 5G phones would overheat in warm weather when trying to connect to millimeter-wave networks. The fault in these cases can lay with the chipset maker, the phone maker, the carriers, or some combination of the three, but whatever the reason, your phone is still overheating and not performing as well as it could.
Why is this a problem?
Enobong Etteh, a prominent YouTuber known as BooredAtWork, says that S22's temperature affects his longterm Genshin Impact play, with his iPhone throttling down from 60 to 38fps during a 20 to 30 minute session regardless of the setting. This is just one example, but overheating can hurt any game's performance.
I have a different, critical application. Every year, PCMag sends phones and drivers around the US and Canada testing cellular performance for our Fastest Mobile Networks project. It involves running nearly continuous speed tests and cranking those radios constantly, which makes our test phones overheat almost every year. Some years, we mount them in front of car air conditioning vents, with the A/C on full blast. Some years, we sit them over trays of ice. Once, we
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