14 DAY TRIAL // The new HTC One M9 got announced at MWC 2015 a few weeks ago, and even prior to its release, it was rumored the handset was doomed to suffer from overheating.
A benchmark test performed on one of the prototypes put on display in Barcelona revealed that was indeed the case.
And a few weeks ago, a thermal image of the phone under heavy load showed the unit reached a surface temperature of 132 degrees Fahrenheit / 55.4 degrees Celsius. Which in the real world means the phone was very hot. Even compared to the previous generation One M8.
You might have heard that HTC had plans of releasing the One M9 in its home market Taiwan last week, but due to some hindrances, the manufacturer had to postpone things until next week. HTC was apparently struggling to push the recent software update to the initial units, before releasing them into the wild for customer pickup.
Well, it seems that the software update has performed a big miracle in terms of heating performance. The Snapdragon 810 is still the chip powering things on the inside of the phone, but the device doesn’t tend to get as hot anymore.
The HTC One M9 does no longer overheat
At least that’s what an updated thermal image of the HTC One M9 being benchmarked suggests now (as seen at Tweakers).
It now appears that the One M9’s sturdy metal body is doing quite a swell job at dissipating the heat produced internally. As you can see in the image we attached to this article, the heat is spreading equally across the phone’s surface and does not remain concentrated into a single spot.
Even so, the reality of things is that the results we’re witnessing now have probably been reached by virtue of tweaking the thermal throttling configuration of the Snapdragon 810 GPU and CPU. Meaning that once the processor reaches a certain temperature, the silicone piece is kept from attempting to overclock.
With the new software update, the limits have been lowered, so that's how HTC manages to keep the phone cool.
You can now breathe a sigh of relief, as the HTC One M9 is no longer impacted by the pesky overheating issues we have been fearing ever since the Snapdragon 810 was said to be affected by them. Now, we’ll just have to see how the One M9 performs in everyday use throughout a longer period of time.
