Replace the battery?

 

Agreed, sounds like a bad battery.

 

its not battery. its thermald
its the temp control system of android. it'll throttle cpu if too hot. but it seems yours reboots instead of throttling. i had hell today with a custom kernel on my mom's s3 and fiddling with thermald (about 20 reboots in 30 min).

 

I suspect your radio is going to maximum power for extended periods in trying to acquire a signal. Try putting it in airplane mode when you feel the temp rising and the battery capacity falling. Leave it off for 10 minutes to see if the phone cools down and the battery power remaining stops dropping. You can also check Sprint's coverage map to see if you are at the frindge of their coverage.

At my apartment, my coverage is good and my phones (all the smartphones I have ever had) remains cool and battery lasts a long time. At my work, my phones always heat up and battery drains in a couple of hours because we are in a fridge coverage area.

If this is indeed the problem, there isn't much you can do except to go to wifi when in this area, but at least you know what the problem is.

 

I've been having the same problem, you can check the thread I started in the Awe General forum. So you said that you had the reboots even before you rooted the phone? In my last post I wrote:

"Update: My son got his brand new Awe for Christmas and while I wanted to root it with him right away I decided not to, or at least for a while. He has been using it a lot and especially playing games for the last three days and so far he didn't experience a reboot yet. Is it possible that the problem could be the rooting of the phone?"

My phone gets too hot too when I lightly use the 3G.

 

I'm not entirely sure what's up with that to be honest. I game HEAVILY on my Awe and ive been testing out trying to reproduce these issues with the stock kernel while rooted and unrooted with some pretty intense games (Nova 3 and COD: BOZ) and can play for more than an hour straight with no problems other than a bit of heat and that even isnt even a problem for me. My battery and cpu temp dont seem to rise any higher than about 65

 

My brother, my girlfriend, and I all bought this phone and all use it similarly and live in the same area

Of our 3 phones, only my girlfriend's exhibits this reboot issue. It's pretty random when it happens, but at least twice happened when we were hitting device storage writes hard (downloading music via google music), and once the phone entered a boot loop when picking up a call.

We exchanged the rebooting phone and now all 3 phones are fine.

This is all circumstantial, but it does seem like this is a hardware issue that requires an exchange.

 

+1 So much this. A good idea to keep the phone charged, also not on the charger all day (like me) its bad for the battery and the phone as a whole

 

Glad you got it worked out.
Thats really an odd issue. My battery fits snug as a bug in a rug. I cant move it even the slightest. Not a jiggle or nothin. Wtf ZTE?

 

I took the cover off and try to move the battery around and it doesn't move at all. I'm sorry but I don't think that is the issue for the reboots. If it was, how do you explain the chain of reboots after the first one?

 

My plan was to exchange the phone over the weekend, if I don't I will give it a try. Who knows, maybe the new phone will experience the same random reboots. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

The terminals connecting your battery to the motherboard is spring loaded. If it is working properly, it would take a very large impact to have the spring terminal bounce off the battery contact. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it could, but usually with an older phone where the spring is losing its strength or bounce. On a new phone, it would probably have to be a manufacturing defect for this to happen.

To check the contact, remove the battery and use a small object to push the contact inwards, you should be able to push it in a couple of millimeters or just under 1/8 inch. When you release, the contact should spring back out. Bounce the contact a few times to see it is 'hugs' the object you are using to push it in. If it does not, then the contact is defective and your paper wedge will only work for a little while.