So I foolishly left my smart phone (an LG Tribute Android) running a video while lying on a towel, and it got very hot, almost hot enough to burn fingers, half an hour later.
So I figure that if I let the phone get that hot, then it’s probably damaged the battery by then. There are no symptoms of anything wrong with the phone right now - it seems to run fine - but that internal lithium-ion battery is probably in a compromised condition right now…right?
The battery shows no signs of damage on the outside, or am I overthinking things? I am no techie so help would be appreciated. Don’t want an explosion some day down the road while using the phone.
I once fell asleep for a few minutes while watching videos on my phone with a heating pad on my stomach. It might have also been plugged in and charging. When I woke up, the phone was laying between the heating pad and the blankets. It had shut itself down with an overheat warning. After it cooled down, I turned it back on and it worked just fine after that.
This is interesting. I watch full movies on my phone with it handheld and it barely gets warm enough to notice. And this is often with software decoding because the hardware decoding of h.265 isn’t smooth. So what makes the difference between overheating and not? (The videos I watch are no higher than 1280x720, the CPU is a 4-core Snapdragon 840.)
They are generally designed to shut down before damage can occur. When I left my LG in my car for a few minutes last summer it shut off and then yelled at me upon starting.
Try not to put phones, laptops, etc. directly on fabric.
Consumer batteries are very safe. People leave their phones in their cars where temps can hit 170F with little consequence. You may have reduced the lifespan of your battery but there is (effectively) zero chance of explosion.
This brings to mind my all time favorite user-manual translation, seen recently in the box with my Digiland tablet. If running on high CPU usage, “the fuselage will get fever”.
Interesting, thanks. What if the phone is still plugged in and charging (which I understand that, if you charge it while it’s running something complex like a video chat, it then gets super hot,) does that shut-down function still kick in?
There are some Samsung users who would disagree with you.
I’m not saying the chance is high, but those phones did make it past all the testing before they actually exploded on people.
There’s was also some problem with laptop batteries in the past, too.
I mean, if it didn’t explode, and it’s cooled back down, it’s very likely fine. But the idea that batteries are super safe isn’t a good thing to say when stuff like that happens, in my opinion.
I’ve left my iPhone (various models over the years) in my car plenty of times on hot days where it got so hot it went to the “iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it” screen with no ill effects.