My Phone Has A Fever

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Fans Voices program and have been provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.

So I'm still hanging out with this Droid Maxx that Verizon hooked me up with. So far I've had nothing but positive things to say about it as I've switched from an iPhone 4. But let's establish again that these are my honest opinions, and let's add some credibility to that by acknowledging that I'm having a problem right now. My Droid Maxx is sick.

Every now and then, I notice that it's heating up in my pocket and I don't know why. Whenever I notice that, I can't do anything about it. There are a whopping three physical buttons to press on the side, and none of them make the phone wake up. It's just a dark screen and a continually rising temperature. I don't know how much you know about electronics, but high temperatures are a very bad thing.

So far I've been able to "fix" this issue by putting it in a plastic bag of some sort and setting it in the freezer for a little while (15-20 minutes or so). Then I take it out, hold in the button that controls idling/power, and it boots up and that's that. Today it's happening again, but I'm unable to boot it up. I take it out of the freezer and let it settle to room temperature again, but then it starts heating up again.

Normally, my course of action would be to remove the battery and let it cool down with no power source. Here's the problem: How do you take the battery out of this?

The whole phone is one smooth surface. There's nowhere to pop the casing off or anything. Once it starts overheating, I'm powerless to stop it other than to freeze it until it's better. It usually works, but that's a sloppy solution.

I haven't heard of this issue from my blogger comrades in this Verizon campaign, so maybe it's just an isolated thing. Still, from where I stand with a computer engineering background, this isn't good and I should be able to do something about it.

The good news is that I still have my iPhone 4 on my regular number (because eventually Verizon will stop giving me free unlimited data 🙁 and then I'll have to supply my own service contract for the phone) so I'm not totally off the grid, but once I go to having one phone full time, I'm a little worried about it getting a fever every month or so.