Nine days ago I started writing down one boring number after every test run. Not a score, not a verdict — just the temperature of the phone's back panel and the battery percentage, both read at the same moment, on the same minute mark.
The first three days were useless. I wrote numbers that told me nothing because I was still taking them at the wrong moment: right after a heavy scene, when everything is hot and everything looks bad. Then I moved the reading to a fixed minute after the scene ended, and the numbers started to behave like a measurement instead of a mood.
What surprised me is how many of my old conclusions were built on the peak rather than the steady state. A phone that hits 44 degrees for twenty seconds and then settles at 38 is not the same device as one that sits at 41 for an hour. Both look identical if all you write down is "it got warm".
The battery column told a similar story from the other side. One percent every eight minutes is ordinary. One percent every four minutes in the second half of a session is a different animal, and it almost never points at the processor. In my case it was the screen holding full brightness on a page that never went idle, plus one background process waking up on a timer I had forgotten I set.
None of this is novel. People who test hardware for a living have done this for years, and the tooling around it is mature. What was novel to me was how much a single fixed measurement point changes the shape of a session. You stop chasing the dramatic moment and start watching the drift.
I am going to keep the notebook for another week before deciding anything. If the numbers hold their shape, the routine stays. If they scatter, the routine is the problem, not the phone.
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