My Samsung Galaxy A53 has been a good phone. Not special in any way, kind of average, really, but absolutely fine for my needs.
Three days ago it started freezing randomly and rebooting itself. With time, the freezes become more frequent and annoying. Last night it froze so hard that it didn’t came back up. I pressed all possible button combinations but no sign of life. I went to sleep thinking it was dead.
But no, today it came back to life again. First thing I did was to look for updates and, yes, there was one! My first thought was that this was some bad update that messed up the software somehow. But after 30min of updating, my theory was proved wrong. The freezes and restarts came back.
I went to the internet to find clues. Clearing cache, wiping out apps (not that I have many), rebooting in safe mode, disabling the 2nd SIM… I tried it all. Sometimes all it took was 10 seconds after booting and BAM, gone again.
One thing I did notice was that the phone felt hotter than usual. I know these devices have sensors that shut them down if they overheat. But why was it overheating? I don’t have any background apps running, and don’t play games and rarely watch videos.
But this was definitely a clue to investigate. I noticed that even after leaving the phone off for a good while, it heater up quite quickly when I booted it up again.
I turned on the power saver and left it on all the time to attempt to throttle down the CPU and reduce heating. Unfortunately, that didn’t work.
So I switched my web search to the heating issue and found loads of people complaining. After some digging, I found two very good tips:
- disable 5G (go back to 3/4G only)
- disable NFC
So I tried these and lo and behold, the heat was gone. And so were the freezes and reboots. At least so far! But the phone no longer feels warm to the touch.
Now I’m going to turn them on separately and try to figure out which one is actually causing the issue!