iphone 4 gets very hot

That was Apple's fix to the complaint from Apple's sub-Arctic users about their hands being cold when they had to hold their phones outside their sealskin and polar bear fur jackets, they call it the- iHandwarmer. It's just under the rear backplate.

Yep, mine gets really hot when being used!

Update...I was making a call (using bluetooth) while charging from wall outlet. I just charged it again from the wall outlet in standby mode and it was fine. Heat caused by combination of making a call while charging...

My phone got so hot while I was making a call it overheated, dropped the call and went black for ~15 seconds. I though it was because i had other apps running but I tried again after closing everything (recently run and running) and it reheated again. The back side gets particularly hot. Hope it gets fixed with the software update!

I'm also having this problem. I just got off the phone after a 5-minute call, and the back of the phone was very hot. I'm also experiencing a few other issues with the phone (like short battery life). I'm trying to figure out if these issues are just with a few of the iPhone 4's or if it's a more widespread issue that Apple will refuse to address...

I am having the same problems. Battery life worse than 3 g and hot while charging and in use. Lots of dropped calls!

make sure to shut down apps that are running in the back ground. Once my wife and I did that, our battery lasted longer and phone didn't seem to get as hot.

If the iPhone 4 gets uncharacteristically hot no observable reason (like leaving it on the seat of your car in the sun) or seems to drain the batt very quickly, then ‘reset’ the phone before doing any more troubleshooting. I had an errant process (my guess) that had it draining the batt and getting quite hot during overnight charge... Reset solved this:

Simultaneously hold SLEEP/WAKE and HOME buttons for 10-12 secs until the screen goes black and the Apple boot logo appears, then release and let the phone do a reset boot.

Hi Guys,

I'm running iOS4 on a 3GS. All seemed good until a couple of days ago when my phone dropped a call and rebooted. I remember thinking it was very hot at the time but thought nothing of it. With all this hot weather it's been happening more often.

Anyway after a bit of research I decided it was the Multitasking that was the problem (If you're running a 3G this won't be your problem).

Anyway, what you need to do is, whilst on the home screen, double press the home button. You'll be presented with a list of open applications or recently opened applications. Tap and hold one of them and a little "STOP" sign will appear. Tap each of these to close the app. I was running 17!

Hope this helps....

mine gets alarmingly hot when on charge, i appreciate a bit of warmth..but very,very HOT to touch.

If your unit gets very hot and you have poor battery life it's probable the battery in your unit is perhaps defective.

Get a Aple Tech to take a look at it if you think it's getting excessively hot.

Some have noticed the unit getting hot when the camera is used, mines not too bad really but if in doubt get it checked.

Terrible battery life led to three calls to AppleCare so far. Seems to be programs running in the background that are not closed down by removing them from the multi-tasking bar. Soft and hard resets seem to make no difference. I believe the problem began with the update to 4.0.1 but I can't really recall when I did the update, so that's just a hunch.

The phone didn't start out this way. Battery life was excellent, even if the call quality wasn't quite up to the 3G IMHO. When I first got it, I used Safari for three straight hours and battery life only dropped to 80%. Now, I'm lucky to get three real hours usage on the entire charge.

Did a "Restore" and "set up as new" last night as per recommendation of the phone tech at AppleCare. What a PITA! Had to set up all my accounts from scratch. And it nade things worse.

Battery is draining even faster, and now the phone is overheating. I could actually feel it through the rubber InCase 3G case I've got it stuck in while waiting to decide what free case I'm going to get. That never happened with the 3G.

Thought it was my hand warming it up, but it continued to get hotter while sitting out of the case and on speaker phone. I could literally watch the battery percentage drop every few minutes while this was happening, so I stopped using it.

Put in on my nightstand when I went to bed at 76% battery life, closed everything in the multi-tasking bar, took a screen capture and went to sleep at 11:13 PM. Screen capture shows 1 hour, 34 minutes usage (way more than I had actually used the phone since the last full recharge, half an hour real usage at best). Checked it at 8:00 AM and it showed 5 hours, 31 minutes of usage (apparently I was using it while I was sleeping?), and battery had dropped 20% to 56%. I haven't used it at all this morning and it's down to 48% at 10:20 AM. Usage monitor now reads 6 hours, 45 minutes. Haven't "used" it all morning.

Funny thing is that the only real reason I took the upgrade now is that my 3G battery was not good anymore. I could have gotten a brand new 3G for $80, or get the iPhone 4 for $200. No brainer, so I thought. Well, I charged up the old 3G several days ago and let it sit on standby for over three days before I checked it. It showed only 43 minutes of usage in all that time, and 3 days, 4 hours on standby. Battery Doc app showed 55% battery life still remaining. Took screen captures of that to show the techs at the Apple Store.



What gives, Apple?



I'm off to the Apple store to have them run diagnostics on it. I'll be asking them to run a diagnostic on the old 3G as well. I may return it while I still can and give up on the whole iPhone thing if I don't get a truthful answer.


Such a shame, it really is a wonderful device otherwise. My wife's 50th BD is coming up in a couple of weeks and I was planning on getting her one. Have to rethink that idea.

drfera - thanks for sharing. i also have a ticket with apple support on an iPhone 4 that is running hot.

we should exchange notes after next steps with apple.

Yeah, mine get hot. I don't know if it's the metal around it, helping conduct heat, or what.

Thought I'd give an update.

I let my phone go until the battery died. No actual use, but the usage indicator said I had used it for almost 20 hours. Standby time was a little over 24 hours. Ridiculous battery life AFAIC.

Charged the battery up all the way. Started using the phone and, lo and behold, the problem seemed to have fixed itself. Not mind boggling battery life, but an amount I could live with. I forget what I got, but it was about 8 hours use and two days standby.

I brought it in to the Apple store to have a counter tech (sorry, I have trouble with the Apple term "Genius")look at it. The tech was rather dismissive, saying that there was probably a third party app running in the background that was causing all the problems. I said that was rather hard to accept since I didn't open any third party apps at all since the restore I did. I tried to show him the series of screen captures I took which documented the lack of use and the rapidly disappearing battery life, but he had absolutely no interest in looking at it.

In the end, I was offered a new phone or I could return the one I had for a full refund (seems to be a new Apple theme). I accepted the new phone, even though I was on the last day of my 30 day trial, so if this one has problems I'm SOL as far as ditching the thing.

So far, the new phone seems OK. Not spectacular, not as good as my 3G, but within reason. Set it up as a new phone yesterday afternoon and got it fully charged. So far, 5 1/2 hours actual use, 28 hours standby and I still have 33% showing. Maybe a few more full charge cycles will bring it up to where it's supposed to be.

Here's an interesting thing I picked up from several conversations with Apple so far. Sometimes an app can start to run in the background (even a native app like Safari)and can't be seen even in the multi-tasking bar. Don't know why, but everyone I spoke to agrees that can happen. A soft reset will shut the phone down and any apps that may be running. It was recommended to do this once daily as general maintenance and good housekeeping. This will also happen when you let the battery go all the way until the phone shuts down by itself. I suspect that there was an app running in the background and when I let the phone run down, the app was forced closed. This seemed very possible to the techs at the Apple store. It doesn't explain the overheating, but that hasn't happened again, either on the old phone or on the new one (so far). Interestingly, the new phone came with OS4.0 installed instead of 4.0.1. I'm leaving it that way for the time being, just in case the update caused the problem in the first place. I can live with the old style signal bars.

I'm done on this thread unless I have an overheating issue again. I will, however, be monitoring the low battery life issue, an I'm far from the only one who's been reporting this problem.