Phone cooler makers need to chill with all the ice

I don’t know about you, but when I have a nasty case of the hot phone, I have to get rid of that heat this instant. Just kidding, I usually just put it down for a while or restart it when it’s being especially stubborn. But there are companies out there marketing a different solution: little stick-on phone-cooling fans that purport to draw all that heat away. And their product images are a little, uh, excessively icy.

How did it come to this? What kicked off this arms race of increasingly frosty phones? I have to assume things started innocently enough, but these RGB-riddled things are pretty squarely aimed at gamers — I’d guess it didn’t take long for these product shots to snowball into the wildly unrealistic pictures on Amazon today.

In this scenario I’ve invented, this Trakxy Magnetic Phone Cooler for Gaming is what our patient zero would look like. The tasteful use of a blue phone and blue highlights circling the fan tells me all I need to know about this magnetically-attached fan.

Some mild frost here and some icicles. Maybe a bit excessive, but I don’t think I’d look at this lavender-colored puck and correctly guess its purpose otherwise, so it gets a pass.

Of course they have them for iPads, too. At first glance, this picture is pretty harmless. Until you look at the digital display. Is Teesso claiming this thing will drop your tablet to five below zero? I’m not sure I want that!

For the Teenage Engineering fan in your life.

Here’s where things really start to go downhill. Black Shark claims this will drop your phone’s temperature by “up to 35°C.”

Some of them turn your phone into an F-Zero racer!

At least this one comes with finger warmers. Very considerate.

Like the low-opacity snowflake pattern overlaid on this one.

And now, here is the final boss. The phone cooler to end all phone coolers. One that nobody has ever written a bad review of because their fingers are too frozen to do so. I present the Yanism Magnetic Cell Phone Cooler.