I’ve had a Pixel 4a for ~3 years at this point. I had to replace it some time last year because I had lost my original in a lake. T-Mobile gave me whichever lower-end Pixel there was at the time and I immediately gave it back because of the offputting amount of warmth it produced doing very little. When the time does come to properly upgrade, how would I go about searching for phones that run cool? I’ve been thinking about my next choice to be a jump-ship from the Pixel series given my, uh, experience (there was a bit more that I didn’t like about it)
Read GSM arena reviews, they test for temperature. Look for 600 series snapdragons or similar.
Aside from that, any high end phone chases power over efficieny. If you can deal with something bigger, more phone will mean an overrall cooler surface.
You can also look at specific SOCs to see how users are liking them. The SD855 was the last chip that I know was very balanced between power and efficiency. The SD8gen1 is a hot bastard, but now the SD8gen2 seems to have ended up another magic chip that runs cool despite its power.
I’d say the 865 was the last “good” Qualcomm chip before the 8 gen 1 broke everything. It can be found in the Galaxy S/Note 20 generation.
Pretty much any soc made by samsung is hot and slow. The return to TSMC with the 8+ gen 1 we saw the thermal improvements.
8gen1 was absolute trash. Performance was phenomenal but only until throttling murders it. It was so bad, active cooling became a thing in phones. Ridiculous.
It killed sonys Xperia mkIVs. Only the 10, which was on an SD695 was any good. 695 seems like another good one, actually. A sibling and my mom got phones with that SoC, and the phones work fast, while sipping battery.
8gen2 seems like a return to form. TSMC again, surprise surprise.
I still daily a SD865 (LG V60) to this day and while it’s losing steam in newer mobile gaming titles, it’s still flawless for daily usage. Can’t think of any complaint really.