Keeping your phone cool during long sessions

If your phone feels like a toastie after half an hour of gaming, it's not broken, it's just working too hard. Heat is the enemy of both battery health and performance, since phones throttle themselves when they get too warm. Here's what actually helps.

Start with the frame rate cap, as always. After that, take the case off during long sessions. Cases trap heat, and a bare phone sheds warmth much faster. It feels counterintuitive but it works.

Avoid charging while you play. Charging generates its own heat, and stacking that on top of a demanding game is the fastest way to a hot, unhappy device. Let the battery run, then charge when you're done.

Lowering the screen brightness helps more than people expect, and so does closing the dozen background apps you forgot were open. Little things add up.

We test every game on real hardware precisely because heat behaviour varies so much. A game that runs cool on paper can still bake certain phones, and that's the kind of thing you only learn by playing for a few hours straight.