Sony Confirms Overheating In Snapdragon 810-Powered Xperia Z3+

Qualcomm can't seem to catch a break when it comes to its Snapdragon 810 System-on-Chip (SoC) and overheating rumors. The latest to join the fray is Sony and its Xperia Z3+, along with the Xperia Z4, essentially the same handset with a different model number of the Japanese market. Sony has confirmed that both devices can overheat under certain circumstances and has promised a software fix.

Over in the Netherlands, testing has revealed the Xperia Z3+ can overheat when using the camera or playing a game that taxes the GPU. When this happens, the phone gets hot to the touch and whichever app is at fault ends up crashing. Prior to shutting down, however, a message appears on the phone saying warning the user that the temperature of the handset is too high.

Sony Xperia Z3 Plus

Sony acknowledged the issue to a Dutch language website. The Japanese company also promised a software update to fix the issue sometime later this summer. Unfortunately, Sony can't work miracles through software, so the update will likely force the Xperia Z3+ and Xperia Z4 to throttle the CPU and GPU more often. Doing so will solve the overheating issue, but it will come at the expense of performance.

This has been an ongoing PR issue for Qualcomm. It's the reason why Samsung opted for its own homegrown Exynos 7420 System-on-Chip (SoC) instead for its Galaxy 6 and Galaxy 6 Edge devices, and though LG wasn't fazed by the overheating reports, some sites have show that its Flex 2 aggressively throttles to the point where performance sometimes falls below that of a Snapdragon 801 or 805.

Qualcomm Snapdragon

Things came to a boil last month when Qualcomm spoke out about the overheating reports.

"The rumors are rubbish, there was not an overheating problem with the Snapdragon 810 in commercial devices," said Qualcomm VP of marketing Tim McDonough. "Our point of view is that those rumors happened with the LG G Flex 2 and Qualcomm 810 being first to market with the premium tier application processor. Then somebody decided to put out some false rumors about that, which is unfortunate but sometimes that's how business is done. That has forced us to spend a lot of time address the false rumors."

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Qualcomm has to say about the Xperia Z3+ and Xperia Z4.