I worked briefly in a team teating the BlackBerry thermals. I’d be surprised if this was the case — phones have temperature monitoring, and are designed to manage their functions to avoid overheating. There are set maximums for each external material (glass, plastic, metal), and exceeding those can result in lawsuits. (Which happen regardless…) The phones should have detected the temperature conditions and decreased power to the radios.

I’ve got interesting comparisons of BlackBerry vs Apple on this metric. Different story though.