When LG announced the successor to the G Flex back in January, the specs detailed that the device packed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor. This alarmed a significant number of people, because despite the anticipation that had been built around Qualcomm's next generation SoC, a number of reports claimed that the S810 had severe overheating issues. Following the G Flex 2 announcement, wariness of the device began to rise, but LG executives stepped forward, admitting that the company did run into some problems with the initial batch of chips but they had been fixed in the time since then.

S810 Benchmark Credit: Heat map of various 2015 flagships

This announcement soothed a lot of agitated nerves, and with Samsung declaring that it would use the Exynos SoC in its flagship, all heads turned to the next major flagship to use the chip, the HTC M9. When HTC announced the device at MWC in the beginning of March, all seemed well, but that relief was short lived when a Dutch site got their hands on the M9 and ran a few benchmarks with GFXBench alongside other non-S810 flagships, yielding alarming results. While all phones tend to heat up during benchmarks, this test saw the other devices running between 37.8 and 42.2°C with the M9 surface heating up to a scorching 55.4°C, attenuating earlier claims that the heating issues had been fixed. However, it should be kept in mind that this could be a bug on the M9 due to it running pre-release software, and if so, it is extremely likely that HTC will fix it before the official M9 release.

While some of us may not push our phones to these limits, or are willing to compromise on this detail, the revelation could be a deal-breaker for quite a few. Does this affect your outlook if you're looking to upgrade this year? Are you willing to compromise to get your hands on the 64bit SoC? Let us know in the comments below!