S24 Plus Overheating when GPS signal is unobtainable

[jmcguire]

Hi Folks,

I experienced a bit of an unusual problem yesterday, I had a long train commute of 7 hours and noticed that my phone was refusing to charge, although it had detected the presence of a charger, and seemed to be taking on 200-400mA but it was still slowly draining the battery.

I had a few different chargers and cables on me, so I tried different combinations but it didn't make any difference.

I then tried the diagnostics in the Members app, and this informed me that the phone was overheating which was affecting its ability to take on charge.

I had an app running called OSMAnd, which I've used for years, and enjoy tracking my route when I'm driving/flying/on the train, but the train yesterday (and the one on the day prior) seemed to be effectively blocking the GPS signal (which I've actually never seen a train do on any previous Samsung phone), and what I suspect was happening is that the App was polling the GPS reciever trying to acquire a lock repeatedly, but this seemed to be generating massive heat issues on the phone.

I'm not sure whether it would be the App to blame here, or the GPS subsystem, but I found it quite unusual, and am left wondering if it's a recognised defect (since it was impacting temperature and charging) and why there aren't safeguards to prevent the GPS unit from overheating in this manner.

When I disembarked the train, GPS came back and the phone seemed to cool down again, so I'm fairly confident that was the root cause.

[BandOfBrothers]

It's possible due to the train moving fast and your phone trying to maintain connection i.e working harder than normal @jmcguire 

[smiley]

It would surprise me if the in-built GNSS receiver would cause the overheating or any possible overloading of the phone, as the current consumption would not likely consume too much additional power during 'acquisition' or 'stable tracking'.

It would be most likely that the cellular chipset was constantly trying to connect to mobile cells and on the fringe of connecting... so constantly scanning for mobile cellular signals.

[Dan0o]

I'm not at all surprised by this because the modem inside the S24 and S24 plus is nowhere near up to par. It's very poor at keeping a lock on a decent signal. Unfortunately, the exynos modem is very poor.

What's really frustrating is the actual phone is very nice but the modem really let's it down.