Some Overheating 3GS iPhones Glow Pink 364
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that dozens of users of the recently released iPhone 3GS have reported overheating issues, with some iPhone owners unable to pick up the device because the handset gets so hot to the touch, while others say the casing turns pink with the heat. 'I am definitely experiencing issues with the iPhone running warm and quick battery life lost,' writes Tom Goldstein on one discussion board. 'The phone seems to warm up almost immediately if I am doing anything that pulls data over the network.' Some users have said the device has been too hot to put to their ear while making a phone call, and others say the overheating seems to occur when owners are using the iPhone's mapping software, which uses the handset's built-in GPS technology. Melissa J. Perenson writes at PC World: 'I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too.' Some gadget experts believe faulty batteries could be the cause of overheating and poor battery life. 'My guess is there's going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs,' said Aaron Vronko, who fixes iPods and iPhones. 'If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it's probably going to be spread to tens of thousands [of device], if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.'"
Android G1 also heats when using GPS (Score:5, Interesting)
My Android G1 - normally cool (in the thermal sense) heats quickly when using GPS for sustained periods. It doesn't become uncomfortable to hold or to use but it's definitely noticable. My bet is that the iPhone problem is also GPS related.
Battery Concerns (Score:3, Interesting)
Having just upgraded from the first iPhone to the 3GS I have to say I am disappointed with the battery life on the new handset, it's certainly not the improvement I was expecting from reviews. With Wi-Fi and location services turned off and very light usage I can get just about 2 days out of it, normal use sees it being recharged every night which is inferior to the old model. I was contemplating returning it to O2 but before I did that I wanted to know if there are any standard tests to see if my battery is that much worse than normal, e.g. the phone plays a movie for 5.5 hours at 75% brightness or play music through headphones for 9 hours from full charge etc. Any thoughts? Reviews also seemed to suggest there was a better battery meter in this model but I haven't seen it, 20% charge remaining still seems to mean run for a recarger, not you have 20% of the usage time you would get from a full charge left.
It can be CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
I am about to file a bug report to a Symbian beta software because I busted it using amazing amounts of CPU if it changes the wireless network while other network it was connected is doing kinda OK with 30-40 percent levels.
It is more like Apple OS X scheme of things, access point groups. Issue comes from application since it has its own access points code. Doesn't use system's built in.
How could I figure the huge CPU load? Simple, battery went hot and died in hours. It is like old fashion way of figuring CPU load.
What I mean is don't eliminate CPU immediately, they are portable devices running portable CPU which was never designed for 24/7 full CPU load.
What we need is, some heroic blog hack the iPhone 3G, install standard UNIX tools (ps) and run ps -aux (or top) whenever it gets hot. I am NOT suggesting it to actual iPhone 3GS owners. You bought it, report bug to Apple using http://bugreporter.apple.com/ [apple.com] . Duplicate reports are always welcome at Apple, they work like ''vote''.
Sounds familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:unable to pick up the device (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There's definately an issue of some sort (Score:5, Interesting)
Although Apple don't want you to know it, the iPhone OS is actually a multi-tasking OS at heart, so a spinning process won't lock up the processor. It'll just keep the CPU pegged at 100% and flatten the battery. What might cause such a thing? On Android, most of the software is written in Java so the only way to make it spin like that is to actually enter a real infinite loop. The iPhone is (rather questionably imho) written in Objective-C, which uses manual memory management and thus lets you do double frees, buffer overruns etc. A classic cause of infinite loops in C based apps is heap arena corruption - you smash the heap control structures in some way, and then malloc or free go into an infinite loop trying to find a free block. Most mallocs don't do much error checking for performance reasons.
What I suspect happens is that there's a subtle memory error in a part of iPhone 3.0 which causes some background process to start spinning inside malloc. The iPhone 3GS has a more powerful processor than its predecessor and it's possible that Apple decided (riskily imho) that it was OK if they couldn't dissipate the heat from a pegged CPU because they would try and ensure the CPU never pegged in software. For instance they might be throttling user applications (I have no evidence of that, it's just a theory). However that overlooks the possibility that their own software would accidentally peg the CPU for some time .... leading to the result we have here.
Re:Android G1 also heats when using GPS (Score:5, Interesting)
My bet is that the iPhone problem is also GPS related.
My somewhat ancient Garmin GPS runs for somewhat over a day continuous on two AA batteries. It has a nice full color screen about the size of a iphone although much lower resolution. It is an inch or two larger than an iphone in all dimensions but that's mostly empty space... its engineered to be less dense than water, so as to float.
So, thats about 3 volts at about 1.5 amp-hours equals about 4.5 watt-hours.
Dividing 4.5 watthours by a pessimistic 24 hours, gives 188 milliwatts.
I'm sure a decade or so newer engineering results in much lower power consumption. Checking out the technical specifications PDF for the first google I found:
http://www.latitudetechnology.com/gps_module.html [latitudetechnology.com]
You're looking at about 23 mA at about 3 volts, for a whopping 70 milliwatts, almost a third less for an "april of 2009" GPS module. Technology marches onward I guess.
1) A quarter watt dumped in a case that large is not going to be detectably warmer, but it'll probably be almost enough to stop dew from condensing on the surface, most of the time. Dew will condense on the surface of my powered up GPS in extreme weather conditions. To get "warm" with a quarter watt, compare the tiny volume and tiny surface area of a typical quarter-watt power resistor to an iphone.
2) Considering handheld cellphones are allowed to transmit 600 mW and I suspect the overall RF section is less than 50% efficient, the phone probably dumps at least 3 times the heat from its RF section than its GPS section. Then probably about half the emitted RF gets adsorbed by the users hands, figure about a watt of total heat in the hands just from the transmitter. GPS or no, will not be noticeable.
The problem is not the GPS module. Now a GPS application could "require" a multi-core GHZ class pentium processor at full blast, but thats a software engineering problem not a "GPS" problem, since obviously a "real handheld GPS" does the same task without turning into a handwarmer. A bad enough programmer could make a tetris that would burn your hands, but that doesn't mean tetris is the problem.
Re:Android G1 also heats when using GPS (Score:2, Interesting)
Why won't manufacturers use batteries with greater discharge rate?
Simple: the batteries would be larger for the same capacity (mAh).
Re:Oh hey no problem (Score:2, Interesting)
They'll just hand you a replacement and restore your data in store. I've seen it done more than once
Re:There's definately an issue of some sort (Score:1, Interesting)
I've had the same problem a number of times with my iPhone3G and my iPodTouch2G since upgrading to 3.0. The devices go flat in less than an hour, and are very warm to touch for a while later.
Definitely an OS issue, as neither device would previously go below 50% over an 18 hr period (even with phone calls) unless was playing games all day
Re:There's definately an issue of some sort (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately not uncommon (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of modern smartphones suffer these exact problems because of the push for more and more features. Basically, a feature add will add power draw, and will also tend to add CPU usage as the applications to run these new features crank up the utilization.
I don't have an iPhone... I have too much invested in the Windows Mobile platform dating back almost a decade to really migrate at this point (plus, I write some of my own little applets and upload to my phone all the time... can't do that with the iPhone without jailbreaking). However, I DO currently have an HTC Touch Pro, my previous device being an HTC Tilt. The majority of the time, the phone is excellent; it runs cool, it does exactly what I want when I want and doesn't have too many horribly nefarious bugs, though much of that probably has to do with the custom ROM I flashed to it. But if I start activating devices such as GPS, WiFi and other features like that it sometimes shocks me how hot the phone will get. Particularly if I'm using, say Google Maps as a GPS application.
Google Maps will turn on my GPS antenna, and then will start pulling data using my 3G connection (I have traffic turned on, too). Both of these add significant power draw and heat generation, and the GM app itself will tend to crank up the CPU. Because of the draw, and because most of the time I only use these functions together in the car I plug my phone into my car charger. But you know what? Then the screen stays on... more heat. Literally, my phone can get to the point where I'd be really uncomfortable holding that thing up to my ear... thank for Bluetooth headsets! Even if I skip Google Maps and use TomTom Mobile, it forces the screen to stay on so again the battery life goes into the toilet and I end up with a rather nice hand warmer on cold days.
Does it concern me? A little. I get concerned that this heat is going to shorten the life of my device significantly, but on the flip side I'm enough of a phone geek I tend to trade out my phones every couple of years anyway to get the "latest and greatest". Also, the Touch Pro has not shown any significant signs of being a problem child... it all works.
The Touch Pro has been pretty well engineered by HTC; they design a LOT of handsets for a lot of different markets. As a result, their experience in engineering these kind of form factors is really good. Their smartphone devices will dissipate heat quite well, and be none the worse for wear. My old Tilt still works as well as the day I bought it ~3 or 4 years ago, except that it's been dropped quite a number of times. Apple's problem is that they really don't have that experience, and as such they DO make mistakes with heat dissipation and things like that in a small form factor like the iPhone. They've done it before; their focus on aesthetics often takes over from the engineering portion... and while I know Apple has some phenomenal engineers, there's no replacement for experience. I think the engineering margins they built into the 3GS were just too tight for such a large CPU bump and general hardware bump. Everyone loves the fact that Apple used the same case (almost) for the 3GS... which is great for all those dock-equipped things that were designed for the 3G... but when you make such a significant jump from the old architecture to the new, something has to give if the margins for error were not factored correctly.
I suspect that Apple will provide a fix soon that will underclock the Cortex A8 core in the 3GS to eliminate some of that heat. Thankfully that's an easy solution until the hardware is reengineered a little. It should be possible to do that by maybe 10% and the average user will never notice the difference. If they're truly running it at 600Mhz, then the A8 provides a nice little mechanism to drop back to 500Mhz, or further. If they just provide a software limit so that the CPU doesn't crank up to a higher rate during high utilization, then it should take care of the problem. Yes, I have a Beagleboard which runs almost the same hardware (thou
This is why I love slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
The poster assumes that the reader is familiar with the size of a typical .25 watt resistor... and for the people who will actually read his (somewhat technical) post, he's probably right.
Nowhere else is technical knowledge brought together with goatse and GNAA trolls so seamlessly.
Love it!
Re:Will the next "feature" be removable battery? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice word game -- "when compared to the equivalent..." You have to add that qualifier because Apple doesn't offer the equivalent of the top tiers of service and support that Dell/HP/etc offer.