Hello ladies and gentlemen this is Sami. Today I bring you my review of Xiaomi-backed gaming phone
The Black Shark.
But first thing is first, I'm not a gamer, I'm not even a big fan of gaming and I always hate playing games
So if I acted stupidly in the game, please don’t give me shit, alright?
The video includes unboxing, design, camera test, gaming test and my conclusion
Without further ado lets get started.
Not every package comes with this free stick controller unless you are one of the first 50 thousand buyers of this Black Shark phone
Open the box we see a black card with text you are gamer, no I’m not
Let’s shark ah that doesn’t make sense even i translated into Chinese.
A phone, it feels much smoother and curvier than I thought, we’ll get to that later.
A simple case, some stickers, a film and two manuals one for the phone and one for the stick controller
A charger supports quick charge 3.0
A USB type-c cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack to type-c connector
The Bluetooth stick controller is in another box
It has an internal 340mah battery and you can play games with it for 30 hours on a single charge.
That’s it
The Black Shark features a 6 inch, 2.5D, 2k resolution display, the fingerprint scanner lies on the front
There is this “Shark key” in the left side
which enables you to enter the high-performance gaming mode
No annoying wife calls, no notifications from your boss.
That’s super nice for some fanatic gamers.
The back features a dual 12MP + 20MP rear-camera setup, dual tone led flash
We’ll compare with iPhone 8plus later
A sad thing is it doesn’t have headphone jack, anyway
The whole phone feels elegant and has a much better hand feel than I thought!
I just like it, even this puppy seems so.
Camera performance has always been a weak point from Xiaomi phones
But in the launch event, it always beats the shit out of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy
So how exactly about this one?
Let’s compare it with iPhone 8 plus.
As we can see the floor down there iPhone keeps much more details than on Black Shark
and wins for the most true to life representation of color
The whole image looks cleaner and less noisy than Black Shark
Let’s check more samples
The dynamic range and overall detail clearly is not as good as iPhone
it lost details in both highlights and dark parts.
But there is one thing I’d like to point is it does a good job on portrait mode
Much better than iPhone 8 Plus
At better light condition, Xiaomi tends to boost exposure in order to achieve a more “pleasing” viewing experience
I will leave to you to judge
For video, I enabled the stabilization on Black Shark when shooting in 4k but that seems doesn’t help that much
Overall for me, Black Shark still needs more work on camera optimization, especially in low light environment.
It has great portrait mode but that’s not enough.
Anyway, who gives a shit about the camera performance on a gaming phone?
Let’s jump to our last but not least gaming test.
Again I’m not a professional gamer, don’t judge on me.
My view on it? Oh man, it’s superb, really really smooth when playing games
I don't feel any lag or frame drops
The only problem for me to win a game is to find good partners, otherwise I will never win.
But there is one thing I wanna say about it: it’s getting too warm after minutes of game playing
like really warm
Seems like the so called “liquid cooling system” is not that cool!
This brings to my conclusion:
There are pros and cons about this Black Shark phone.
The positive sides are it features the strongest specs you could ever find in the phone market up to now
Snapdragon 845 chipset with Adreno 630 GPU, up to 8GB of RAM, the budget price, the design is elegant and beautiful
the great loudspeaker
and yeah the big battery
The down sides are the poor camera performance, no headphone jack and yeah it’s getting warm to fast
I personally would suggest you just buy it if you are a heavy gamer
Without doubt it would bring you the best experience in this price range
But you know, I always hate gaming
Thanks for watching guys I’m until next video, stay subscribed!