Black Shark 4: Is This Cheating? By MUO

This is Paul with accused, and today I'm looking at one of the unique gaming phones ever made. This is the black shark series 4. A few weeks with this, and it has completely changed my perspective on mobile gaming. There are a number of reasons I haven't really been able to enjoy playing games on phones in the past, mainly being that their controls were just too inconsistent, and you could never really get those accurate, pinpoint precision, movements that you wanted with Xiaomi's latest release. They've got two important tricks to help solve that, one being a highly responsive screen and the second being magnetic pop-up triggers for the past couple weeks, we've been testing the shark 4 in a variety of situations, gaming, some multitasking and comparing it to some of our more traditional phones. In my case, the iPhone 12 mini, and with that we weren't just having more fun playing the games on this phone, we were actually playing much better compared to our other phones.

In just two days. We quickly ranked up in games like Call of Duty mobile, where we actually reached master tier levels and coming from someone who doesn't actually enjoy really playing games on phones or didn't in the past. That's saying a lot and well, of course this is a phone that does much more than gaming for this review. I'm going to be focusing on the experience gaming with this as well. Some other key important features that make this stand out from other phones at its core.

This phone is actually packing a lot of great specs for its price. The black shark 4 uses the Qualcomm 870 processors, which is very common in upper mid-range phones, as well as some affordable flagship devices standard. It comes with six gigabytes of ram, but you can either upgrade that to eight or 12 gigabytes. Storage starts at 128 gigabytes, UFS 3.1, which is really speedy, but it can also be upgraded to 256gb. If you want to with this review, I'm checking out the six gigabyte model with the 870 processor and 128 gigabytes of storage.

You've got four optional, colors magic, black, black, blue and silver. I think blue is one of the nicer colors they offer. Interestingly, they also include a case in the box, which is actually pretty cool when you pop it on you'll notice. It covers most of the device, except some sides as well as the back here, and I think they've intentionally left out some cutouts on the back for better heat dissipation, important connectivity. This has 5g, it's got Bluetooth 5.2, it's got USB type-c 2.0, and thankfully it also has a headphone jack. So if you want to listen to music, or you want to play games with zero latency, that's something that you can do with this phone in the middle right side.

That's where you find your fingerprint reader. It responds pretty quickly, and I think the position is pretty good. Even just using this, with one hand, is easy to reach with your thumb. On the other hand, smaller hands might struggle a little to reach this. Holding this with one hand, can be a little difficult with the screen being so large, even though this is relatively thin at just 9.9 millimeters, it's almost 164 centimeters tall and 76 centimeters wide moving. Your thumb to one end of the phone is definitely going to require a stretch, and I'm not easily able to reach the top of the phone, and so this is mostly going to be a two-handed experience.

Luckily, it's not too heavy at about 210 grams, actually a little less than the 6.7 inch iPhone pro max. In fact, being that this is a big 6.7-inch screen, you actually have the option to minimize your screen for a more one-handed experience. When you've got your magnetic triggers released, you can actually use the right or bottom trigger to switch between the one-handed modes, and you can actually click the settings button there, which allows you to switch between 4.5, inches, 4, inches and 3.5 inches for that minimize screen and, of course, you can disable it and enable it at a click of a button. Speaking of screens, it's an AMOLED with very punchy colors. It supports HDR, 10 plus, which gives you impressive, blacks and very vibrant colors.

It's not quite as bright as I wanted it to be. That's especially true when you're gaming, outdoors or just using this outdoors in general, but that's kind of a downside to AMOLED screens in general. Aside from that, all your content, your games and your mobile browsing are going to look really nice on this big screen and sticking with the screen for just a bit longer. It does have a couple other special things going for it. For starters, it has 144 hertz refresh rate compared to the last year model black shark 3, which is just 90 hertz.

This helps to keep up with fast movement more easily, whether you're, gaming or just scrolling, and because of how fluid that screen is everything just feels snappier with the phone and just gives you a faster experience overall. One thing to note, though 144hz is impressive, and not a lot of phones have that right now, but not all games support that certain big name games like gentian impact Call of Duty, mobile and pub g cap out at 60 frames per second. So you can't really take advantage of that 144 hertz tied in with that, though, even if you have an app or game that supports 144 hertz, it doesn't necessarily mean that the CPU and GPU can keep up what I mean by that is, if you push a game and increase its graphics level to the max possible settings, it's going to result in lower frames per second, just like it would on a PC, and so with that the list of games and apps that support 144 hertz are growing, but you still might need to change your settings in order to get those frames. Perhaps more importantly, though, than the fast refresh rate screen is the fast 720hz touch sampling Xiaomi claims this to be the most responsive, touchscreen in a smartphone ever and with the high pressure sensitivity, it makes it super easy to get precise movements for even the most competitive games. I'm just easily able to aim and move around with much more precision compared to traditional phones.

iPhones, for example, only have touch sampling at 120 hertz, higher sampling rates. As with the black shark. Let the phone register your taps, flicks and movements much more quickly and frequently. Shooters were definitely the big struggle on my other phones, but with this I'm just easily able to aim move around and lock on my target, far easier. Now, when you combine that with this other big feature, the pop-up triggers, which I mentioned earlier, that gives you a very complete control system.

That is, unlike anything, I've used on a phone before at times. It definitely felt like I had an unfair advantage, comparing the gameplay of just using the on-screen controls versus having physical buttons is a huge difference for shooters, especially being able to map your triggers to aiming down the sights and the other to firing, makes you much more competitive, and it allows you to play better. Your thumbs can focus on just movement and aiming while your fingers on the triggers handle shooting. In my experience, the combination of the high touch sampling with the physical buttons actually made for a more enjoyable and more precise experience compared to even using a controller, and while I don't think I'm as good at playing games on this compared to using a mouse and keyboard. This is definitely a close second, as you push this phone and game a lot with it, you're definitely going to want to make sure that it stays cool and doesn't overheat.

This, I think, is another key area that gaming phones stand out compared to normal phones is in their cooling design in the black shark, 4 they've upgraded their liquid sandwich, cooling design, which is supposed to have a 30 percent improvement in heat dissipation. More graphically intensive games like bench and impact do stress this phone a lot and after a few hours of gaming on it, without a cooler on it actually does get pretty hot to the touch to the point where I actually need to set it down and let it cool off, but that's where you can actually attach their optional fun cooler to pro poor. Naming aside, it's a heat sink with a 7 blade design that cools the phone noticeably in seconds with its front display. You can actually see the temperature drop in real time. Of course, this has customizable RGB lights, because what tech device these days doesn't when you pair it with your phone's Bluetooth, it can even be programmed to change colors based on the game.

You're playing at full frozen speeds. You can actually get pretty audible, but no joke. It does feel like a freezer is attached to the back of your phone, and when you want a quieter experience, you can slow down the fan, so it's not as audible for 30 dollars. If you plan on gaming hard with this phone for a long period of time, it's a no-brainer and props to them for making this actually compatible with other phones, too, is not just limited to the black shark ecosystem. It can be used with any android and iOS device, because all you need to do is plug it in and use the app.

I think cameras are more of an afterthought with gaming phones. No one's really getting this specifically because of its performance. It does have a triple setup on the back with a 48 megapixel main shooter, a 5 megapixel macro, as well as an 8 megapixel ultra-wide. The shots you get out of it are actually pretty decent at this price point, though, by no means is it a slouch. Yes, of course it's not going to be competing with an iPhone, but the results are actually pretty good.

Some daytime shots in less high dynamic range situations were pretty comparable. More cameras aren't always better, and in this case I actually would have preferred to have just two, or even just one, perfect, solid camera that I could rely on all the time it does tend to struggle a bit in high dynamic range situations where the highlights are frequently lost even compared to 48 megapixel stills. I frequently found when you zoomed in on them. They weren't as sharp even compared to the 12 megapixels of the iPhone overall snapping photos. Just wasn't as snappy.

You know compared to more flagship cameras. Every time you switch between the different cameras, it took a little of time and every time you took a photo with a 48 megapixel camera, it did take a second for it to process with that. I think you could potentially miss a shot just because of how long it takes to switch between the modes and so you're, probably better off just sticking with one mode. If there's something important that you need to capture the 5 megapixel macro camera was kind of cool for getting some close-up shots, but in general I think it's pretty limited just because of how low resolution the pictures are. I don't think many people are going to be using this as a result, and it probably would have been better off for them to again just include two or one really solid main camera selfies using the front camera were all right, and they'll get you by, but I think it did struggle with sharpness and overall, the images felt soft, and they did struggle in those high contrast scenes where it gets a little.

Weird, though, is with video. The quality is pretty good. Yes, it can record up to 4k 60 fps, but I found that you could only record at that high resolution and frame rate using the main shooter when you switch to the ultra-wide you're maxed out at 1080p 30fps powering everything you do have a beefy 4500mah battery, and it does support quick charging using the base 67 watt charger that usually comes in the box it'll charge to 100 in less than 25 minutes. You can actually upgrade and get their optional 120 watt charger, which will charge the phone to full in less than 17 minutes, that's very impressive for a phone and that beefy charger that is optional can actually power. My laptop, if you're at all, like me, and you deplete your phone's battery all the time, and you forget to charge it overnight having fast charging like that is a lifesaver when it comes to charging, though there are a couple downsides, especially when it comes to gaming, if you're using the magnetic pop-up triggers the one on the right specifically, is a little difficult to reach.

You can see it's a little awkward right now and playing with this over time actually causes you to cramp a little as you try to avoid constantly pressing up against it. It's not the most enjoyable experience and being that this is a gaming phone. I think this is one of the areas that they could have distinguished themselves from regular phones. Yes, in general, this is the most practical and common place for a charger to be placed. However, I think if they could have figured out a way to put it at the bottom, you know like a PSP and Nintendo DS or other portable gaming systems.

That just would have made a lot more sense again compared to using it on the side and so coming into this review. Yes, I was a little skeptical with the gaming phone. I've never had one before and in general. I thought. Yes, I understand their concept.

They have better specs than maybe traditional phones, they have larger screens, they have certain modes which sometimes optimize games, but overall I thought. Is it really worth it in this case, with the black shark series 4? I think yes, even if you don't get the pro version- and you just stick with the bass, specs you're, getting very good specs at its price, and it has a lot of nifty and handy features. It's going to cool it down faster, it's going to charge quickly, and it has this massive screen and, of course, if you are a gamer, the fast touch sampling combined with those physical buttons make this definitely a game changer. Not only are you going to enjoy your games more, but you're also going to play better. If you have any questions, or you want to learn more about this phone, you can ask us in the comments down below, or you can reach me directly at any of my social medias.

Thanks for checking out this video, and we'll catch you in the next one.

Source : MUO