Xiaomi Black Shark 4 review By GSMArena Official

Hey, what's up guys will here for GSM arena? This is the black shark 4. This year's dedicated gaming phone from Xiaomi, while it doesn't bring all the bells and whistles as competitors. Do itbe also cheaper? Does it still have what it takes to provide a great gaming experience, let's find out in our full review, this year's Xiaomi has come out with both the black shark 4 and the black shark 4 pro, which has better specs but is only found in China. So the non-pro version here is what we're going to see worldwide looks wise. It's a pretty typical curved glass smartphone with what feels like an aluminum frame. This color scheme has an x-shaped gradient pattern, but there is a more vanilla looking option if you want the angular camera bump, also hints at the phone's hardcore nature.

Unique hardware features are expected from this sort of device, and the black shark 4 doesn't disappoint with its physical shoulder triggers they're retracted inside the body, and you can pop them out or back in with a couple of switches on the side. The triggers are click and responsive and, in my opinion, more satisfying than the more common touch, sensitive ones and, together with the phone's excellent haptic motor you get overall, a pretty satisfying tactile experience. The black shark 4 screens is a 6.67 inch OLED with a 1080p resolution. There's no gorilla glass protection, but there is a superfast 144hz refresh rate to help smooth out movement on screen.144Hz is pretty impressive on paper, but in practice it isn't used. Often the phone will enable 120hz when you're interacting with the home, screen and games that support 144fps are rare.

You can force 144 in game settings, but without support it wouldn't work. Well with that aside, this screen is quite nice. You get deep, OLED, blacks and HDR 10 plus support using the phone outdoors is no issue thanks to a max brightness of 500 nits with a slider and a boost up to nearly 700 nits in auto mode when in bright sun. Color accuracy is perfect. Here too, and since it's an OLED, the black shark 4 has support for a noise on display and is quite customizable too for audio there's a pair of symmetrical stereo speakers, one firing from the bottom and the other from the top they're well-balanced and earn a good rating on our loudness charts.

The sound quality is great, with punchy, mid and vocals, and even some bass there's also a 3.5 millimeter jack. If you want to plug in traditional headphones, the black shark 4's fingerprint reader power button is side mounted and sits a bit recessed into the frame. So you won't press it accidentally when gaming, it's superfast to wake up and unlock the phone, and you get 128 or 256 gigs of storage on board the black shark 4, which isn't expandable the phone's interface is joy, UI 12.5, it's an adapted version of Xiaomi's mini for black shark phones. It's almost the same as mini 12, with an app drawer to store your apps in and a separated notification center and control center. One unique feature here is that you can use the shoulder triggers as customizable shortcuts for different tasks.

They can even be set to work with the screen off pressing and holding both shoulder triggers will call up the shark space a dedicated hub for your games from here. You can manage your game collection, sync, the phone with accessories and also select global settings for things like notifications, you can also access a ton of settings from within a game through the game assistant, which appears if you swipe from the corners of the display under the hood of the black shark 4, is not the highest tier flagship chipset, but it's pretty close. It's a snapdragon 870 built on a 7 nanometer process, and it's basically the same as last year's top performer, the snapdragon 865 plus, but with some higher clock speeds. This means that in benchmarks, the black shark 4 pretty much comes out on top over last year's flagships. However, it does fall short of those phones running this year's snapdragon 88.

Regardless of that, though, gaming performance is flagship, great and the heaviest of titles run smoothly. Plus you get support for 5g connectivity to manage thermals. The black shark 4 has an internal cooling system involving vapor chambers and other elements, and they do a great job. After an hour of punishing tests, CPU performance was still at 95 percent of the maximum. Unlike the Nubia red magic 6, you don't get an internal cooling fan, but you can buy an external one called the fun cooler too, and is excellent at preventing thermal throttling during those long gaming sessions.

It actually requires an outside power source, though, and the best way is to power from the phone itself, but you need to buy an extra cable as the one provided with the fan doesn't have USB on both ends. Powering the black shark 4 is an average sized 4 500 million power battery, and it was able to score an endurance rating of 96 hours in our proprietary tests. It's pretty good, but nothing exceptional, especially for a hardcore gamer. What is exceptional is the charging speed outside of China, the phone ships with a 67 watt charger, but you can buy the optional 120 watt adapter, which we have here. This thing is a brick, but with it, we were able to charge the phone from zero to 100 in just 19 minutes incredible.

I hope it's sustainable in the long term, though, now onto the cameras, there's a quad Bayer main cam, an 8 megapixel ultra-wide cam and a 5 megapixel macro camera. The main camera takes 12 megapixel photos by default, and they are nice with vibrant colors, good contrast, balanced, sharpening and a decent amount of detail. The HDR does a pretty good job, managing the shadows and highlights as well portrait shots from the main cam are great. They're sharp, with vivid colors and the edge detection and refocus backgrounds are convincing. The ultrawide camera's 8 megapixel photos are just average in quality they're generally on the soft and noisier side, but still the colors and contrasts are in line with those from the main cam and the lens distortion correction.

Does a nice job too. The macro camera has autofocus, which greatly improves the chances of getting a sharp photo. These 5 megapixel shots are good with nice, colors sharpness and detail in low light photos taken with the main cam are pretty good. They have well-balanced shadows and light sources. Look nice too colors and contrast are natural as well.

However, these shots are a bit soft and because of the lack of is, you can't end up with some blurry or out of focus results. If you enable night mode, you also get cleared up noise and better sharpness contrast and detail. The best part is that these shots don't take too long to process either ultra-wide cam struggles at night. These photos are foggy, lack detail and have a narrow, dynamic range and there's no net mode support here, either selfies are taken with a 20 megapixel front facing cam. The detail level here is disappointing for this resolution, but still the dynamic range is wide.

Noise is minimal, and the phone does a good job in exposing for the subject's face. The black shark 4 can't record 8k video like the rest of the recent gaming phones can, but the 4k footage from the main cam is quite impressive. It's sharp with balanced processing, low noise and good contrast, and the dynamic range is quite wide. There's no stabilization in 4k, though the ultrawide cam can shoot in 1080p resolution. These videos are noisier and softer than the main cams and dynamic range is more limited here.

So that's the Xiaomi black shark 4. You get a nice looking design that incorporates physical shoulder triggers, which is something pretty unique. The AMOLED display is quite nice, and this is solid, chipset, great sounding stereo speakers, a dependable main camera and crazy fast charging. The phone does fall short in a few places, though the super high refresh rate of the screen has to be enabled specifically for each game. Title and actual support is limited, plus all the other gaming phones have more powerful, chipsets, and you'd have to buy that lightning, fast 120 watt charger and the cooling fan separately at the end of the day, the biggest advantage that the black shark 4 has over other gaming phones is a lower price, but these shortcomings make you wonder if those savings are worth it thanks for watching guys, stay safe and see you on the next one.

You.

Source : GSMArena Official