Sony smartphones and heating issues, they go hand in hand. A major reason for this to happen always, is the glass body that doesn’t easily dissipate the heat around, and keeps the device warm for a long time. It was since the Xperia Z3 that we started noticing the phones to heat up quite quickly on gaming, or whenever recording videos using its camera.
The blame was generally on the build and material, but this time, the popular-for-wrong-reasons Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset seems to be claiming as the reason for heating of the newly announced Sony Xperia Z5.
To be frank, we are going by the words of PhoneArena, who were at the IFA 2015 event and had held the Xperia Z5 for sometime before concluding about the heating. The bigger issue is that they weren’t even playing games or recording a 4K video on the camera, yet they see the message saying that the phone is overheating and the app will shut down.
Pic source: PhoneArena
It is also noted that those are prototypes, but still, this is quite a concerning matter, where even when the Sony smartphones already get heated quickly, are now seeing more than a single reason for annoying the users.
Qualcomm’s flagship chipset couldn’t do quite well this year, and this specific chipset used in OnePlus 2, and Xperia Z5 is the second gen. Snapdragon 810, which is said to have a tweak in clocking speeds to avoid overheating. Sony’s Xperia Z3+ came in with the same chipset and the company also had acknowledged about the warming issues, but were they left with a choice for Xperia Z5? Given how the company is releasing smartphones in a cycle of 6-months, there was no other major processor they could include, but that is backfiring onto them now.
Samsung was aware of the issues in Snapdragon 810, and thus included their own Exynos chipset in the flagship Galaxy S6, and although the phone did warm up, it wasn’t to an extent to which the Xperia Z3 did. Imagine how bad the situation would be on the Xperia Z5 Premium, which would put even more load on the processor when trying to render 4K content.
Rather disappointing to see the image, and if Sony couldn’t manage the heating part, good luck to them on trying to sell these hot devices. I only hope that the final version that gets shipped, shows some promise by not heating to an extent where camera app shuts down by itself.
