Depending on which hemisphere you call home, you might be deep in the middle of summer right now, and that means everything is hot, hot, hot. If we’re talking beach days and vacation vibes, “hot” sounds pretty good — but maybe not so much in the context of our favorite smartphones. Don’t get us wrong — we’re always on the lookout for the next hot new phone — but here we mean more the “thermal runaway” kind of thing, which is less than ideal.
Some phones (and phone-makers) have really developed a reputation for running hotter than the rest of the pack, and that’s not a behavior without consequence. Phones start complaining when they get too hot for safe operation and they can dial back on performance and functionality when you push things too hard, too long. When Google introduced its own Tensor chips with the launch of the Pixel 6 series, everyone was curious to see how they’d compare against components from the likes of Qualcomm — and it didn’t take long for users to start noticing how hot their phones ran.