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Comment by failwhaleshark | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of which, how could mobile phones be made to work in extremely hot temperatures for emergencies without shutting down?

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Mostly just by using better components and beter internal cooling (=thicker design).

You can find same chips (=same function) made for consumer electronics, automative, aeronautic and military, all with different temperature and humidity ranges. I'm not sure about mobile phone CPUs/SoCs, but automotive equipment is a lot more resilient to voltage spikes well above the normal 12-14V.

Aerospace / military spec'd components would probably be the best way to go where possible. If it's a lithium ion battery issue, then maybe they should be using a different battery chemistry.

It’s really just comes down to thermal mass vs. power dissipation. Either you have to increase the thermal mass, or limit the power. 99.99..% of use cases are for the phone to be in your pocket inside, so designing in a larger thermal mass, or limiting performance isn’t going to be a factor that drives design.

However, since most phones are relative water resistant now, a good option is to use evaporative effects to cool them down. You could also dig a hole in the earth to find cooler temps and dissipate heat that way.

I think the earth approach is a good option, even if one has to dig a few feet down to find some cooler ground in the middle of nowhere.

Well you don't leave them out to bake all day, usually.

I left my Palm Pilot on the dashboard of my car one day, and the LCD melted.

Fortunately, I had seen this before in undergraduate physics lab, the day our LCD experiment was interrupted by the room thermostat breaking, sending the temp > 100F. The nice thing about LCDs is that the crystals reform when it cools. All you have to do is wait. Probably works for most modern phone displays.

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