[Nexus 6P Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] cb474:
That's an interesting article. Thanks for posting it.

There are two problems with that article though.

1) It really falls into the realm of the many pseudo scientific, hand waving "tests" of phones with the 810, that seem motivated more to dismiss the issue than really examine it carefully. The thermal images are cool and create the impression of technical expertise and scientific testing. But their methods, in their own words, involve "the Nexus 6P was picked up and played with." Further, the phones, to which they are comparing the 6P, from earlier tests of the HTC One M9, the Galaxy S6, and the LG G4, were not subjected to the same type of "playing with." With the earlier phones they "took some pictures while making each phone jump through hoops" and with the 6P they did "five minuted [sic] browsing and checking social media, and five minutes playing Ski Safari 2." So not only is the "playing with" test totally unscientific in and of itself, but they don't even do the same things with the different phones. How can the temperature comparisons mean anything? Obviously they don't.

The second test is with benchmarks and would therefore seem to be more objective, but they don't explain what benchmark they use and there's no reason to assume they did the same thing with the different phones, since they didn't in the first test. So who knows. Further, if the thermal images they posted are to be trusted, it appears they aimed the thermal camera at the edge of and not in the middle of the hottest part of the phone, which could only lead to lower temperature readings. And in the first image, for the temperature while the device is sleeping, they don't even aim the thermal camera at the same point on the phone as in the second two images, further making the test an unscientific and meaningless comparison of apple and oranges.

So I'd say those tests tell us almost nothing.

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2) More importantly, even if we accept the tests at face value, they totally miss the point, which has been stated over and over again in this thread. The problem with phones that have the 810 has not predominantly been being to hot to hold. The problem has been that because the 810 easily overheats, it must throttle heavily to avoid getting hot and this undermines it's performance.

So heat is the cause of the problem, but not the symptom you would expect to see. The symptom you would expect to see is throttling and underperformance. And the Android Headlines test of the 6P (linked to just a few posts up) shows that like all phones with the 810, the 6P does throttle heavily. Once it warms up Android Headlines found that the performance on the 6P drops by about 30%. In fact, Android Headlines already pointed out that the 6P does not get particularly warm to the touch and is even cooler than many other phones (so that should not be new information to people following this thread). But they correctly point out that the price that is paid for this lack of heat is the loss of performance. See: http://www.androidheadlines.com/2015/10/featured-review-google-nexus-6p-2015.html

So depending on how people plan to use the 6P they should not necessarily expect better performance than on older phones with the Snapdragon 805 (like the Nexus 6) or 801. This does not mean bad performance. It just means not necessarily an upgrade over other slightly older recent phones.

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So there are zero surprises here. Not because there's nothing wrong with the phone in a glib "huh, imagine that" manner. But because heat is not the issue. Throttling is. And throttling on the 6P, as was to be expected with the 810 chipset, is real. Whether this will be an issue for specific users, depends on how they plan to use the phone.