So there's a difference between active cooling and passive cooling. Passive cooling is what
we normally see inside of smartphones, like copper heat pipes or thermal paste...stuff
that just allows the heat to flow or passively transfer from one place to another. Active
cooling systems, on the other hand, use energy to cool something down. This Black Shark 3
Pro gaming phone supposedly has quite a bit of both and I think we should test them out.
Let's get started.
[Intro]
So all of the passive cooling, like I mentioned, is going to be inside of the phone with the
double heat pipes and all that. But here on the outside we can start checking out the
active cooling. This little package can supposedly get colder than ambient room temperatures,
but there's only one way to find out for sure.
Starting off we can see that right now the temperature is in the high 70s. As soon as
I plug it in, the fan turns on and the multicolored LEDs start flashing, which of course always
boosts HP FPS and the LOS of your HUD deterring an RPG, if you know what I mean. Within 30
seconds of plugging in the Black Shark fan, already the temperature is magically dropping
to the low 50s. I'll set it down for a second and let it cool off some more. And we can
check out the other cool thing about this phone.
We've seen pop-up cameras before, but what about pop-up buttons? 43 degrees. The Black
Shark Pro has two motorized pop-up buttons, one at each end of the phone when you're holding
it horizontally. They motor on up out of the phone and can be programmed as if you were
physically touching any point on the screen. This video isn't sponsored by Black Shark
or Hill Climb in any way, I just think it's super cool. The pop-up buttons can supposedly
support rising out of the phone 300,000 times and can be used as a clicky button for more
than a million times. That's quite a lot of gaming.
Our active cooler is now down to 34 degrees which is pretty crazy. That's as cold as it
gets inside of a household refrigerator. We're definitely off to a good start with this guy.
The little mount expands to clamp on the exterior of the phone, and probably would work with
more phones besides just this one. And that cold surface of the active cooler can wick
away the heat from the phone on a much larger scale than passive cooling could accomplish
all by itself. Especially if it's located right on top of the processor which might
be here dead center in the middle of the phone. Now obviously I'm curious as to how this works
and you are too, or else we both wouldn't be here....together...separately. So let's
see what makes this thing tick.
There are 3 screws inside of the fan, and then another two screws on both sides next
to the expandable legs. There's a super thin rubber coating glued down over the massive
copper heat sink, probably to protect the glass of the phone as they're clamped together.
So far I'm pretty impressed with this thing. It's definitely not designed to come apart,
but after a little aggressive persuasion we can finally see the insides.
A large slab of copper with a temperature sensor on top. This temperature sensor communicates
with the phone so you can physically see the temperature of the cooler while it's running.
Six more screws hold the fan shroud to the base of the cooler, and this is where things
start to get interesting. The entire middle chunk is made from metal. Each single one
of these little fins is acting like a heat sink for the top half of the cooler. And you
might think that this heat sink is for the phone, but it's actually for the white square
we saw underneath. This white square is a thermoelectric cooler. It's a solid state
active cooler that uses electricity to create a temperature difference between two conductors.
As one side is getting colder, it's pulling the heat away and the heat has to go somewhere
so the other side of the white pad gets ridiculously hot and that's why the metal heat sink has
to be so large. As long as the cool side of the electric cooler is against the phone,
it should work very well at removing heat. We'll have to check out that internal processor
placement during the teardown.
Now though, I think we should continue the durability test. Black Shark does make some
of the more inexpensive gaming phones compared to the more expensive guys like Razr and ROG.
Fun fact: sometimes the screens of smartphones are also used to dissipate heat since usually
they're pretty thin and right next to the metal frame. Lucky for us the Black Shark
3 Pro starts seeing scratches at a level 6 with deeper grooves at a level 7. So far,
so good.
There's 120 megapixel front facing camera up here in the top bezel, along with the top
front facing stereo speaker. There's a plastic grill up here covering the earpiece, but it
looks like it won't ever be falling out on its own. We have another plastic grill down
here at the bottom for the other front facing stereo speaker. No complaints yet.
The sides of the phone are made from metal, along with the dedicated gaming button slider
which puts you in a 'do not disturb' mode for playing solitaire or whatever the kids
are playing these days. Am I out of touch? I think we can all agree though that there
is no more Pokemon Go until this corona thing is over. The raising side buttons are made
from plastic, on the top at least. I'm looking forward to the teardown to see how these work
from the inside. And what is this? A gaming phone with the headphone jack? I guess if
an audience is loud enough, Black Shark does listen. And here it is again....back. The
headphone jack. Thumbs up for that.
On the far side we have the volume rocker and SIM card tray. There is no water ingress
protection rating on this phone, and it also does not have expandable memory. There is
USB-C charging at the bottom that's capable of 65 watt fast charging, which I think is
one of the more powerful chargers we've ever seen. No gaming phone is complete though without
a light-up logo on the back, and the glass is also textured. None of that smooth slippery
business. The glass portion of this phone doesn't actually even cover the whole back
panel.
There are three sections of glass bracketed by portions of metal frame. Super strange
design which is going to make the teardown all the more complicated. The
top triangular piece of glass here has three cameras inside. A 64 megapixel main camera,
a 13 megapixel ultra-wide, and a 5 megapixel depth camera. Personally I would have exchanged
that depth camera for a telephoto, but that's just me. There's only one flash. Then down
here at the bottom we have an attachment point for accessories, like a magnetic wireless
charger.
Now normally I do a fingerprint scanner scratch test to make sure the fingerprint scanner
can handle a bit of abuse. But with this Black Shark 3 Pro, I would almost be finished registering
my fingerprint and then it would quit. And this happened three times in a row. So at
least on my unit, the optical underscreen fingerprint scanner is unreliable, even without
any damage done to the surface of the glass.
Now the Black Shark 3 Pro is a pretty big phone. It's got a 7.1 inch 1440p AMOLED display,
with a 90 Hertz refresh rate, which is quite a bit faster than a normal non-gaming phone.
It makes calculating those Angry Bird trajectories all the quicker. Once again, I am unsure as
to what games kids are playing these days. The screen did last about 30 seconds under
the heat from my lighter, and then did not recover. There is now a permanent white mark
in the center of the screen. So if you're ever sanitizing your phone, you're fine to
use alcohol wipes or Clorox wipes, but definitely not flame. It took us 6 years and hundreds
of phones and a worldwide pandemic, but we finally almost found a reason for the burn
test.
And now for the bend test. I would guess that gaming phones probably get abused a bit more
than regular smartphones. But no matter what direction pressure gets applied to this phone,
from the front or the back, it remains solid. Probably in large part thanks to that massive
metal structure across the backside. I'm pretty impressed. This phone has a lot of things
going for it. Unsure if they will ever be sold here in the United States. But that active
cooling system and motorized buttons are just icing on the cake for an already pretty cool
smartphone. It'll be fun to see what Black Shark comes up with again next year. What
do you think the ultimate gaming smartphone should have? Let me know down in the comments.
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