Want to avoid your smartphone getting hot enough to melt butter? Get yourself a SnapDragon S4-powered phone!

I really don’t like it when my phone starts overheating. It happens now and again and it’s hugely frustrating — because it’s a super indication that my battery is about to jump from 65% full to 10% in a few moments. 

Often I actually switch the phone off for 10 minutes — deliberately — to make sure it cools down properly, before switching it on again. 

Sometimes the phone(s) — I’m talking about multiple brands here — actually run incredibly hot. 

Hot enough to melt butter?

There’s a question. 

This is something that the team at Qualcomm’s SnapDragon unit decided to investigate on camera with handsets featuring their S4 processor and some leading competitors. The results are pretty dramatic. 

On each phone the team ran a ‘Dhrystone benchmark’ test to simulate maximum CPU use for 20 minutes to really get things… cooking.

To be sure, all the phones they tested did generate heat, but it’s the competitor ones that acted almost like frying pans. Francisco Cheng over at the Qualcomm blog has more. The handset from Competitor B was running hot after 5 minutes and then white hot by 10 minutes.  

Here’s the video: