The black shark 4 pro finally gets its international release with a global rom in
2022 when it originally came out in 2021 so it's been quite a weight this model if you don't know
about it it's powered by the snapdragon triple eight my review unit here that was sent out to me
does have 12 gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of storage the rom on it is joy ui which is based off
me ui 12.5 the camera on the rear 64 megapixels the main one and an 8 megapixel ultra wide
selfie camera is 20 megapixels and then the screen this is a very good screen super amoled over 1 000
nets of maximum brightness hdr 10 plus 6.67 inches and it's full hd with a refresh rate of 144 hertz
in our box you'll find the following so a type c to type a usb cable a little bit of paperwork
three black shark stickers a 120 watt power supply now their claim is 15 minutes to fully charge it
in my testing it takes 20 or 21 minutes it is very quick extremely fast and it's charging a 4
500 milliamp hour battery so it's not doing bad at all really quick one of the fastest around
we've got a sim tray tool and then our case this case is a hard plastic style one so not
a soft tpu case it does protect the edges of the phone and the back of it but that's basically it
first thing you notice when you get the phone then it's 220 grams it's a little heavy not only
that it's about 10 millimeters the thickness so on the side here we do have our always on
capacitive fingerprint reader now i do find that it works really well you simply just tap it and
it unlocks you can see that it's about well just a few milliseconds it's very quick okay and accurate
it works much better than in screen fingerprint readers so hardware game triggers here along the
top you simply flick the switches and they make a nice little noise so mechanical buttons there that
pop up this is much better than the capacitive ones and more on those later on when i get on
to the gaming performance of it so you flip the switches either side again and then they recess
and sit right in there nice and flush so the back of it here made out of glass you've got this
s with an x looking kind of logo to it and right here this is an led so you can customize this
have it set up also for notifications then in the camera department here 64 megapixel main camera
we do have an 8 megapixel ultra wide and then a macro camera that's 5 megapixels so
the frame around the outside this is all made out of metal we've got a type c that does not
support video out so it's still usb 2.0 i think video out is a must on a gaming focused phone
at least it does have this right here which is our 3.5 millimeter headphone jack then up the top we
have our secondary loudspeaker which comes out the earpiece 2 a little bit very good loudspeakers on
this and i will give you a sample of them later on at 100 volume and a secondary mic used for
noise cancellation on the left our sim tray so it takes two nano sims in this but it does not
support micro sd which is unfortunate the volume up and down button this is made out of metal and
you'll notice that we've got a third microphone here and these lines they are the antenna lines
now the ui that it's running is called joy ui it is based off miui 12.5 okay now there was a big
firmware update about three gigabytes it came through and it fixed a big problem i was having
installing some applications i just could not run them on this device but luckily that has
been fixed so you might see up the top here that i only have h if you it's very hard to see though
it's a little small either h plus or 3g it's showing that's because i can't seem to get onto
with this model i've got lte band 20. that's very disappointing considering the fact this is the
international release i would have thought the modem should have covered this very popular band
at least for europe now my version has 12 gigabytes of ram and it is very quick and fluid
the rom i've not seen any problems running at 144 hertz 144 frames per second it really doesn't show
any animation issues or lag it seems to be the android 12 roms with miui 13 that are problematic
problematic this based on me white 12.5 i think is a little more stable so when you swap over
to different applications and even something heavy in the background like gentian impact
okay it has to reload the task manager will end up killing things off a little bit too
so we've got the 12 gigabytes of ram but it's difficult to actually use all of it
so a couple of things i wanted to run through pass mark safety net status here is passed that's good
okay really good there to see that gps works well not a problem very good average signal strength
one of the highest highest ones i've seen actually for a while and a wireless very very
quick there up to around a gigabit in transfers with wi-fi 6 and my course wi-fi 6 router camera
2 api support is there so if you're after a gcam port to get better or different looking photos
out of the 64 megapixel camera and that eight megapixel ultra wide and the five megapixel macro
it's worth a look and sadly wide vine level three so you guessed it yep netflix is only in standard
definition amazon prime video standard definition geekbench score here now this is not actually too
bad for a snapdragon triple eight it is last gen so far in my experience the snapdragon 8
gen 1 hasn't been that great or amazing and this score very good but the snapdragon 8gen
1 can reach a million points in the right foam with active cooling with a fan that i've seen
so far in another phone that's currently embargoed at the time of me doing this so free available
storage remember there's no expansion there's no micro sd card support with this you're looking
approximately 104 gigabytes worth 128 gigabyte version but that storage is very quick ufs 3.1
and you can see the speeds here they are looking great very good random reads and
writes and that sequential read excellent for 128 gigabytes normally 128 gigabytes would be a
little slower and that was the big firmware update that just recently came through was approximately
three gigabytes audio quality so we do have an earpiece up here that sounds great for voice calls
and it does have active noise cancellation so that's removing some of the background noise so
i didn't have any problems with calls great to see we still have support for this ancient technology
analog 3.5 millimeter i still love it and i think a gaming phone definitely needs it
and it has it so that's really good to see what about the loudspeakers so down with firing here
and then out the earpiece on that side these loudspeakers are really good they sound great
they're very rich and they've got a decent amount of bass to them here is a sample at 100 volume
and on to what this phone is really all about and that is our gaming performance
and gaming so we've got shark space we've seen this one on the previous models before
and you can add your games into this so you can configure it so you've got do not disturbs it
can clear the memory when you launch the games help boost performance you get the idea it also
does give us a monitor so i'm going to check out now the performance here of a very popular title
pubg we'll see how it runs and what kind of settings we do have available to us
now this is great we do get the 90 frames per second option most other phones including the
other phone i'm reviewing with the new snapdragon 8 gen 1 only allows the extreme now extreme is
just 60 frames per second but at 90 that's really one you want and if you're serious about this game
the gaming triggers plus that 90 frames per second are definitely going to help
now if you run it on balanced you see it drops down to extreme only so we have to go
with the smooth option unfortunately but hey i'm good with that i'll take 90 frames per second
let's jump into some gameplay now and i'll show you how we set up the triggers here
for pubg you just need to swipe here from the top right hand corner this brings up this menu
so you can see our frames per second at 90 frames per second so that's definitely working which is
good and then you go into this which is master controller and you can sit there in the master
triggers and it's these overlays so you set the overlay we want the triggers to work to be
so i've set them up as a and b here to be the fire and then look down the sights i think
is the easiest but you could put it to whatever you want it's basically just emulating the touch
that's all it's doing with these hardware top triggers which is still a lot faster i find
than tapping here to shoot gaming like this with these triggers is so quick you'll see if i can get
up to oh he's already killed them my teammate got them but you're able just to tap to look down your
iron sights or your scope so quick tap and fire that quick i do find it a lot better than using
the touch controls now swiping here again from the top right hand corner you can see it is a solid
constant 90 frames per second and the load on that snapdragon triple eight is only always around 50
because it's on the balanced setting here with the graphics so visually it's
not the top setting at all it's the the lowest actually sorry it's smooth the smoothest setting
but it's so just that smooth very very smooth here so if you're serious about pub g you get
the 90 frames per second you've got a flat screen bright screen and then these hardware
gaming triggers i do think it's one of the best out there for gaming with a title like this
and other titles very demanding ones like gen chin impact run good on this but it's not the smoothest
i have seen on the highest possible settings right now you do occasionally get a few frame dips and
often it's running at around just 40 to 45 frames per second and not a smooth constant
60 there's only one phone that i do have a review of my channel now another gaming phone that has a
fan in there to cool it that can achieve this and that's what the snapdragon 8 gen 1 but it doesn't
do bad this performance is good so what i will do is game now for one hour and i'll check back
on the thermals just how hot is the black shark four pro going to get onto our thermals now so
one hour of ganshin impact which is probably the most demanding game out there maximum settings
it's oh yeah up to about 50 degrees celsius here on the back of it my ambient temperatures they are
approximately 23 degrees so that was the front of the phone what about the rear of it where it feels
almost a little hotter similar kind of temps there around 48 it does feel quite hot to the touch
so the cooling uh yeah not quite doing the job here and remember i don't have a case on it if
i've got a case on then expect probably about 51 52 degrees celsius over 12 cameras now so
the front facing camera can shoot only 1080p video at either 30 or 60 frames per second and
you can see that it does not have any electronic image stabilization which is quite typical of the
phones i previously viewed of black shark i do think it was the same the audio bit rate is 326
kilobits per second that's a lot better than the typical 96 kilobits that we often see with them
let's have a look at the rear cameras now for video this 64 megapixel sensor at least
does have electronic image stabilization as i pan around you can see a few jutters come through so
optimization is needed there and it seems to be just well that android trait that i talk about a
lot we can't seem to get rid of that on android so the electronic image stabilization working
well there's no problems with the focus at all and the 8 megapixel ultra wide camera that can
shoot video but only 1080p 30 at least this camera does 4k 30 and 4k 60. now this ultra
wide is looking no way near as good so you can fit more in the shot but i personally would not
be using it it looks very washed out 1080p quality and the lens really is not up to the job for video
foreign
and battery life it's not really that good especially at hertz i'm only able to get just
over five and a half hours of on-screen time which is day-to-day kind of normal use if it's straight
out gaming then it's about two and a half to three hours it really burns through that battery quick
but of course you can charge it in only about 20 minutes is all it takes because it's 120
watts which is super quick the good thing about it too that you can set the refresh rate to 90
hertz or 60 to really extend that battery life because 144 hertz just burns through it so quick
so the build quality of the phone isn't bad it is solid it is a little heavy around 220 grams
and about 10 millimeters thick so it's a chunky phone the gaming triggers however really good
i do like those the physical hardware buttons instead of just capacitive touch ones at the top
like other gaming phone models are really good and this phone well optimized for pubg it does
support the 90 frames per second option which a lot of models models that i'm reviewing don't
even have they just kept it at just 60 frames per second so this is 90 which is definitely
you do notice that difference between 60 and 90 is so good fingerprint reader really quick
so fast no problems with it at all and the screen is fantastic flat amoled not only that 144 hertz
but it's very bright it gets well over 100 nits and it's hdr 10 plus and let's get into
the things that i don't like about it the phone now the cameras are not flagship level we've got
no electronic image stabilization with the front facing camera the ultra wide is very poor it's
only eight megapixels and then the other things like why is there no wide vine level one suit it's
level three so no netflix in full hd and amazon prime video stuck in standard definition
then why is there no video out out of the type c port at the bottom that's missing
and being an international release now finally which is very late we still don't have lte band
20 which doesn't really make any sense because that's a very important 4g band to have in
europe at least and it's missing it it doesn't even have it it's like they took the domestic
chinese model and just flashed a global rom onto it that's basically all they've done then
there we go a new phone and so late in the game to have the last gen snapdragon triple eight i don't
kind of know why they bothered wouldn't it be better just to wait for the black shark
fire with the snapdragon 8 gen 1 whenever that's coming out i'm sure just probably be a few months
away before we see that release so thanks a lot for watching my review here of the black shark
4 pro it's a bit of a mixed bag of things but if gaming is your priority and you play a lot of pub
g you get the 90 frames per second yet the gaming triggers very fast charging and the 3.5 millimeter
headphone jack it probably is one of the better phones out there definitely for pubg gamers