FP4 Getting Hot While Streaming + Battery Draining Fast

I got my FP4 a few weeks ago and everything works fine except for when I am streaming stuff with mobile data. Then the Phone gets really hot and battery lasts only 2-3 hours. (The battery life in general feels really short). Is the heating issue normal and are there any Tipps on how i can prolong my batter life (For instance with changing settings etc).
Thansk for any feedback and Help

Welcome to our community.

Basically, the main factor here should be resolution. If your video streaming uses 4K resolution (2160x3840), there’s four times as much data and probably a similar ratio of energy consumption compared to when you use simple HD resolution. Note that an FP4 display has 1080 x 2340 pixels, so anything beyond simple HD (1080x1920) is more or less just waste.

If it’s sufficient for you, you can of course choose lower than HD resolution and reduce energy and data consumption as well as processor effort (i.e. heat) even further.

For audio, this should all be on a lower scale in terms of heat production, but the same basics should apply: The lower the bitrate, the cooler the device should remain.

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This doesn’t sound normal. My old Android phone would get hot with (group) video calls mostly. My FP4 remains cool in basically every situation, also watching videos in high resolution. 3-5 hour battery life with the screen on and mixing it with other activities such as navigation, taking pictures, browsing, music, bluetooth and such is basically what the battery size on Android can provide you. If you’re coming from an iPhone, then this is indeed very low. But for an Android this is the average.

Just as a test, I’ll play a 4K video now for 30 minutes and see what the impact is. Then you can compare. 10 minutes in, device is still cool. Will update later.

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High, when streaming using WIFI it doesn’t happen, It strictly only happens when using mobile data. I am coming from Android (Huawei), I was also wondering if it might have to do with 5G, as my old phone wasnt able to recieve 5G and there i didnt have these problems.

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Good point, I’ve disabled WiFi now, using 5G for the the remaining 15 minutes of my test.

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When I switched to 5G the battery drain indeed started. But the phone remains cool. It got a little warmer, but definitely not hot, or as hot as my old Pixel 3 can get. I’m also using the stock case by the way.

I’ll do another test with 4G.

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Thanks a lot man, Mine only gets “hot”/warm after maybe 30 minutes or so. So i guess it’s that (5G), paired with the high resolution. And on youtube or netflix it works fine even with streaming data its more on sites where I stream football games or movies without paying for it. I really appreciate your help. Was afraid my phone had something wrong with it but guess it should be fine. Just disable 5G and set the quality to a max of 1080x 2340.

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I continued the test with 4G, seems to have a very similar if not identical drain (maybe it’s slightly less battery hungry, but it seems minimal). So I see no need to disable 5G. Changing the resolution probably doesn’t change the drain either, since it works fine with WiFi. So it could be that the 4/5G modem is the cause for the drain. So anything keeping it busy might have the same effect. In terms of thermal energy, it didn’t change anything, it’s still cool.

Hopefully future Qualcomm modems are more energy efficient. iPhones seem to be king at this area. Would be cool if Android chipset vendors could catch up.

It might be related to the coding of the video streams. Maybe the streams from YT can be handled by HW and those from the other sites need SW decoding because of a different encoding algorithm? Still that wouldn’t explain why it doesn’t happen over wifi… :man_shrugging:

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It also seems to get very hot around the camera module when using VPN over 5G (at least that’s what I’m using now while noticing this, reception is also about 1 to 2 bars, while in the train).

If you have a notebook with you on the train you can enable USB debugging and use adb shell top to check if it’s caused by a process causing high CPU load.

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Good point. Will do next time. Question is if the heat was caused by CPU activity. Maybe the 5G modem is causing this. Will need to check the schematics sometime.

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Couldn’t find schematics, but I suppose the CPU is next to the camera. Yesterday my phone got hot again and I saw some processes consuming energy. The Busybox top command isn’t that feature rich as the procps-ng packaged one on Linux distros, but it kinda does the job.

I rarely use the quick searchbox on my home screen, so I don’t get why it’s processing anything. I did replace the Google searchbox with the one from DuckDuckGo. Maybe that triggers a bug from time to time. I’ll try to keep an eye on it and if this becomes the usual suspect. system_server consumes a lot as well, settings for some reason as well and YT Music is consuming 3x more than usual. Just a guess, maybe it’s downloading playlists and indexing those songs. But like I said, more data is needed to arrive at conclusions.

com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox is also responsible for the Google Feed on the leftmost homescreen, listening to “OK Google” trigger words and a whole lot of other things.
The name is misleading, that’s the Google app.

Are the Feed or Google Assistant enabled on your FP4? :thinking:

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They’re both enabled, but not the “OK Google” hot word detection. I’ll keep an eye on it.

I also have a big problem with the heating of my FP4. I have never experienced this problem on iphone, huawei or nexus.
Mainly with the GPS and the multifunctions.
When I read your resolution proposals, dear UPPERCASE , I have serious doubts about my purchase: do you have to be a geek to have an FP4?
Isn’t there a possibility of bad manufacturing? Is it useful to propose a change?

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Welcome to the forum :tada:

No, not more or less than with any other phone.

What kind of multifunctions? Can you name the apps you’re using? And is that in combination with GPS? Of course throwing a lot of compute jobs at your phone will generate more heat than using one simple app. Just using navigation doesn’t heat up my phone by the way.

If it makes any difference, my Pixel 3 could get pretty hot as well. In comparison my FP4 is cooler.


Fairphone by the way recommends using a SIM card not older than 2 years. This often improves battery life. Al faulty SIM card (and faulty hardware in general) can cause CPU interrupts and drain the battery, but also generate heat. How old is your SIM?

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405062185489

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