Nokia Lumia 920 heating issue explained!

Nokia Lumia 920 is definitely one of the most powerful, solid and sexy looking Windows Phone 8 powered devices, since the device released, contradictory feedback was given from various users indicating how much happy they are or how mad they are with device.

After the random reboot behaviour issue that all branded Windows Phone 8 powered devices suffered from including HTC and Nokia, which has been confirmed and admitted by Microsoft, they promised a fix to this issue, an OTA already pushed to HTC 8X, leaving Lumia 920 the only leading device waiting for this treat.

Is that all? Nope, there is a new player of the drops issues (Hope drops will not count to reach an ocean!!). Nokia Lumia 920 users are reporting an overheat issue on the top back of the phone in addition to deterioration in battery life, which makes users scared and annoyed. On forums and discussion boards there are lots of defenders and attackers, some users tried hard to help by suggesting different tweaks, starting from disabling NFC, GPS, background apps …. etc. Nothing helped.

Users claim it on the apps running in the background, which certainly could be a reason!! what? a  few maximum apps in the background could make the phone suffers from an overheat issue? Android with their theoretically infinity multitasking apps never ever suffers from this issue. Some users confirmed the issue happened even when NULL is running in the background, and the NFC … etc. tweaks applied.

From all the above, i decided to do my own test and investigation on my Lumia 920 unit, here what i found:

1) Built in applications running in the background will never cause the phone going warm, only after heavy use of Nokia Drive, City Lens and Camera, you can feel slight warm in the back top of the device, still this is not an over heat and normal this happen due to processor clocks to a full speed for consistent amount of time, this is reasonable, iPhone and Android power devices could get warm from similar activities.

2) Testing third party apps, even there is no huge selection of applications that are commonly used, but after careful asking users who faced this issue, i found that social networking apps are the most common apps installed of the complaint users. Facebook, the application certainly buggy and lacks proper notification, through out testing the app still function properly in coordination with WP8 OS, i didn’t notice any issue of battery drain nor overheating stuff, same applies to a lot of other applications like twitter, tweet caster, youtube, camera lenses apps … etc. Finally i came over the real play maker!! WhatsApp!! W T ….

Yes, the whole issue with WhatsApp, after using it for few texts, i notices noticeable heat increase in the top back, and things are under fire as more as i am using the app, i felt like am doing my fingers BBQ treat while holding the phone using WhatsApp, in addition, battery drain!! OMG, that was the fastest battery drain test i ever ran over in my lifetime using gadgets.

To conclude what happened with simple technical language with less fat. WhatsApp is malfunctioning in the background, took advantage over the S4 Processor, reserve all cores and threads to the application and over-clocking the CPU intensively. Even when you close the app, practically you are not, the App will keep going for some time in the background (15 to 20 minutes) abusing the devise resources without even functioning the application, that being said, the app will only release the devise resources when it goes idle which is not a fixed duration based on my intensive test. The app will dramatically drain your battery for granted, and will make you have a hot chill fried fingers after few minutes of using it. When i uninstalled the app. Yeaah fixed right?? Nope!! Why, the app looks sticky to some DLL libraries which calls the CPU registers (If you know assembly language and microprocessors you can tell!!), making these DLLs corrupted, and your only cure will be to factory reset your phone or giving it back to warranty to push a fresh OS copy.

Update: WhatsApp pulled out the application for the Market few days back, yesterday they published with new version number 2.8.1 which is obviously a proper one (so far as my test goes).

I hope the above will put an end to this myth, i wish you find it informative, see you in the next drop!!