so could this quite possibly be the best gaming phone you can get for the price it's the black
shark 4 with some very good specs on offer here some blazing fast crazy charging speeds
so just 20 minutes with 120 watt charging for a 4 500 milliamp hour battery is really impressive
this is all powered this phone by the snapdragon 870 now it has a 48 megapixel camera main camera
on the back 8 megapixel ultra wide 5 megapixel macro and also a 20 megapixel front facing camera
and my time testing it out this phone is really impressive in terms of its gaming performance
but it also has these hardware pop-out triggers which do add another level to your gameplay
especially with titles like pubg which i'll be testing out in this in-depth review quick
look first of what we get inside the box so we get some black shark stickers and there is a case that
they include this is a hard case and it doesn't offer a lot of protection just the corners really
and the back of it because it's all open here now that is for the side fingerprint reader but
also for the gaming triggers there is like a warranty card thing and whatnot but that is in
chinese and here is our cable so this is a thicker gauge cable this one because it is
a 120 watt charging which they claim should fully charge the phone the 4 500 milliamp hour battery
in just 17 minutes but in my testing it's 20 minutes which is still excellent and there's
the charger this one has the two-prong uh chinese or us style with this but it's great to have such
a powerful charger and just an insane charging time of 20 minutes is amazing build quality of
this one is quite good it is a heavy phone though 211 grams and it's 11 millimeters thick so right
there we have the sim tray which takes two nano sims no micro sd card support unfortunately
two antenna lines here we have the volume up and down button and it's all middle the frame around
the outside along the bottom here we have a type c port 3.5 millimeter headphone jack quality out of
this is very good and yes this type c port does support video out all it does is just clone the
display but it's great to have on a gaming phone i think a lot of people will end up using this
microphone loudspeaker here another antenna line and we have the triggers so these triggers here
just flick the switch and they pop right up they have about a millimeter of travel to them and they
do feel very good more on them later on when i get onto the gaming portion of this review but
they are great to have these hardware triggers so much better than the typical capacitive touch
so this fingerprint reader here is capacitive always on doubles as our power button too
and i'll just demonstrate that tapping that that it unlocks really quick and for me this has been
a 10 out of 10 fingerprint reader it just works so well every single time and unlocks really quick so
here we have the earpiece at the top and a ring around the front facing 20 megapixel camera sadly
i don't like this trend really wish they would stop that and you can see that our bezels they're
not too bad with this and there is a little bit of a chin as you can see right there so overall
build quality is good and you'll see that we've got the logo there on the back with the s and
if you move it around a little bit that it does reflect a little bit the pattern there
now a very nice screen in this one 6.67 inches full hd plus and the refresh rate is up to 144
hertz for some reason it's saying 120 here now brightness i have measured up to 800 nits but
it can do a peak of 1300 nets so it's very very bright and it's just super responsive all in all
a excellent display here and it's flat of course no curvature to it which is really what i do like
to see with these screens so just quickly show you here just a few little test images that it is an
excellent display and the blacks right there even though it just stated green colors that's blacks
very very deep and then the whites here are uniformed you're not going to see any dark patches
around the cutout or around the edges because it is a super amoled screen here that they've
gone with so in the settings for the display we do have a lot of options you've got the ultimate
refresh rate which is the 144 hertz or 90 which is a good blend of battery life and smoothness
i would probably actually use that one myself 60 if you want to save on your battery life of course
and great that we do have this anti-flicker mode so dc dimming that is there it works on all of
the refresh rates so not just limited to say 60 hertz which it was with some phones in the past
from xiaomi it isn't here dark mode you've got your reading mode and everything like that as you
expect and your color scheme you can adjust the white balance the color saturation it is all there
so this phone runs joy ui 12.5 which is basically me ui 12.5 it's just skin slightly different
for the black shark phones android 11 i'm on the latest firmware there have been quite a few little
tiny updates that have been coming through now performance wise everything is super quick on
this very very smooth and fluid 144 frames per second the ui task manager kills things off
a little bit i haven't had any problems with the signals quality strength and placing calls
anything like that has been actually really good i'm currently on 5g and that does seem
to be working quite well so very good performance wise gestures all just work so well and really no
complaints there no microstat the only thing i have seen is a bit of what i would call
unoptimized battery drain that's happening with it in 5g mode you lose about 10 overnight of standby
drain and i hope that they can tighten down on that black shark and improve upon that so here's
the battery life this is my typical test i do displays calibrated to 200 minutes of brightness
and it ran from 100 down to 20 7 hours and 51 minutes at 144 hertz so it takes a huge toll on
the batteries so you're only looking at about six five to six hours of screen on time realistically
with the 144 hertz option and then if you set it to 90 hertz which i did here just to test out on
the battery life that then becomes about seven to eight hours of on-screen time so a lot better i
that's why i would run 90 hertz myself personally with this one and here you can see the charge
time so just ignore this 45 percent this doesn't actually report and work with the fast charging
okay fast charging completely throws it off so it thinks the battery has only got a capacity of
2 000 milliamp hours which is completely incorrect here so really quick two percent to 100
in a blazing crazy fast 20 minutes the phone does get quite warm as a result it gets up to about 45
degrees and the charger does also get about up to 48 degrees so it does get a little warm there
the internal storage is very very quick here so we have ufs 3.1 storage 128 gigabytes that i have
with this model here excellent random reads and writes i'm going to zoom in there for you you
can see that that is not going to be holding up this phone at all and that's another reason why
everything just feels so quick on this particular model so there is our antutu score really good
this is antutu version 8.5 i haven't got the latest version 9 because i have some validation
error when i try to use it and the scores also seem quite a bit higher around 600 000 well that's
that one so that's why i use this so really good score you can see gpu performance there
very very good there wireless speeds are excellent so up to almost 1 000 megabits
per second but it's 900 or so it will cap out on my wi-fi uh 5 network sorry wi-fi 6 this is
and it's really good so wi-fi 6 support and good strength good range reception same with 5g and 4g
not a problem gps works well with a very good average signal strength here of 35 in the green
it will see a lot of satellites even though here at the time it was only locked onto eight
accuracy will not be any better than three meters camera two api support is the maximum level three
so look for gcam ports if you did want them of course and sadly a security level three here
for this one even though the firmware updates have been coming through none of them have patched and
corrected this so i do hope we get a security level one later on so you can actually look at
netflix and amazon prime video and things in full hd not just standard definition which looks quite
blurry and not exactly great to me so they do have the game lobby which is their shark space
and that's a separate app which is really a gaming hub that's what it is it simplifies things you can
have all your games in one place custom options and settings and everything like that you can go
through so do not disturb modes all of that you can record the gaming footage there's a lot on
offer here that we do see now with a lot also of other gaming phones they have the similar features
there you've got your manual recordings you can start doing that screen capturing what you're
doing recording that and there are configuration settings there too for using the triggers which
i'll get onto soon so you can see your games are in here and you can select them just through this
and it does a bit of a performance optimization when you launch them what it does is just clear
out anything in the background the memory and that will help in theory boost the performance so i'll
take a look now and some pubg gaming on this and just how it performs if you set it to the smooth
graphics option here you get 90 frames per second which i think most players will probably do this
so the above settings then just brings down that frame rate to the extreme which is i think
extreme what's that 60 frames per second and you do have the uhd well you can download the
ultra hd textures but because i want to run smooth there i want the 90 frames per second i'm going to
play the game on that to configure the triggers all you need to do is then swipe once you're in
a game you can swipe there from the sides and you get the gaming menu here you can see 90
frames per second and normally it's a solid 90 frames per second the whole time with this one
and there's different options that you can set up macros you've got your different blocking there
for you do not disturbs you even got an anti-miss touch so try to get rid of the accidental touches
game config and it's this one right here where you can move around and configure the triggers
so you've got the a and the b triggers and you simply move them to where you want so if i want b
to be fire and then the other one to look down the scope then you simply just have to move them
to that place there so this performance is great it is really really good it's just a constant 90
frames per second we do have the snapdragon 870 and that is a very powerful processor and it's
almost just as good as the snapdragon triple eight pretty much and when the triple eight starts to
get a little hot you'll find that it will probably be about the same level of performance as this one
whoa whoa whoa see how much easier that was with the triggers that was an actual plan not a bot
there so very easy just to tap the trigger to aim and i do find it it's so much quicker and
just easier than touch and my reaction times are quite poor now but that was pretty good for me so
you simply just tap there to look down the side and fire and that's why the triggers they are
really really good here so performance i'll just take another look at that 90 frames per second
it only varies by just a few frames per second all the time every time i've been checking it
it's always been at the solid 90 there so great performance especially for pubg gamers out there
call of duty all those kind of titles i think really do suit the triggers the trigger set up
and the fact that you can just aim and fire so quick that's what i would have it said
to but you can set it to whatever you want on any game you could be something else and
i'll check out now jen shin impact i will play that one and we'll see how it performs
so performance of this one is surprisingly good because i have set it to the maximum settings so
that is highest and 60 frames per second so when i swipe here you see 60. now it's not a constant
continual 60 frames per second i have noticed that there are a few frame dips now and then depending
on what's going on you've got a few enemies and attacks now the triggers at the top you
can configure them of course it saves it per game so what i've done is set one here to be my spell
and the other one on the left that is my attack and that seems to work all right
now you could set it to whatever you want so what it's doing is just emulating one of the
touch controls here okay i could set it to jump i could set it to swap over to different characters
whatever you want to do so that is great that we've got that level of customization there with
the triggers and it's more for your i think your fps game so your first person tuners like call of
duty and pub g i think those triggers are really suited for that but it's still handy with this one
let's just look around here there's a lot to render and this is on the highest settings
and it is doing a really really good job here and just so smooth i can't believe how smooth this is
really good so have a look again and yeah it seems to just be a constant 60 frames per second with
this and considering how demanding this game is that's really good to see so what i will do
now is game for one hour gen shin impact and i'll report back on just how hot is the phone going to
get okay so let's have a look at the temperatures the good news is that it hasn't had any problems
with the screen dimming but the bad news is well it's up to 51 degrees almost 52 i think
it touched on which is that's getting way too hot and looking at the back here where the chipset is
that's 52 degrees as well and this is after one hour of jen chen impact at the maximum
setting so i would run it on lower settings to stop the phone from getting so hot so the
two loudspeakers on this one are quite immersive they're loud they have a hint of bass and the 3.5
millimeter out does sound very good to my ears it's clean it's loud and really no complaints
it also has a sample at 100 volume oh and the cool quality 2 is very good with this phone no problems
over to our cameras now so with this front facing camera we can only shoot 1080p and it does not
have any electronic image stabilization as you can see so it looks sharp the quality is good
320 kilobits per second audio but as i walk ahead it shakes around all over the place so really
they do need to add the electronic image stabilization i hope with a firmware update
that black shark can do this here we are with a 4k video on the rear 48 megapixel
camera with an f 1.8 aperture as you can see there is no electronic image stabilization
sadly now they could have certainly add this in a future firmware update but perhaps they don't
because they don't want the video quality here to compete with some of their other phones
or simply because they just think that gamers don't need electronic image stabilization with 4k
footage but the good news is that if you shoot in 1080p by 30 frames per second
and 60 which this is it is at the moment we have electronic image stabilization that does
work relatively good setting out the image of course and just jogging ahead a little bit
you can see that it does a reasonably good job but remember that this 48 megapixel sensor does not
have any optical image stabilization with it at all one thing to point out too that the bit rate
with this one here with both 1080p 60 and 30 is exactly the same even though
60 frames per second is capturing double the amount of information
so for the price that this sells for which is around about 350 or under 400 euros i think it
is really good and probably one of the best gaming phones at the moment those hardware triggers they
aren't really a gimmick at all they do add to your game play and it's so much quicker as you
probably saw there with my reaction speed which is not really that great i was still able to aim
and then fire in pub g there so quick thanks to those triggers there and with other titles
you can certainly still use them to assign whatever on-screen control to those two hardware
triggers which is great so the performance even though the phone does get yes it does get too hot
really playing a game like gen shin impact it got up to 52 degrees which is quite uncomfortable the
middle frame around the outside when i was holding it then yeah this is getting really really hot
it didn't show any sign of throttling at all the screen did not dim down it didn't screen throttle
as i call it and it maintained a 60 frames per second solid the whole time well it may have
dipped down just occasionally there but really impressive performance out of the snapdragon 870
and then of course the charging speed on this phone is just crazy crazy fast very very good
and it has a solid build quality and a really good screen it's super bright very responsive and that
impressive 144 hertz so the areas of improvement definitely with software updates hopefully
we're going to see how to xiaomi is that they can fix the cameras on this
for video performance so at the time of this video there is no electronic image stabilization
on the rear cameras on the front camera and they really do need to add that i think it's just being
overlooked and i do hope that a firmware update would add the electronic image stabilization
support the other is the widevine level the research so that means we're not going to have
netflix in full hd sadly it is going to just be in standard definition until they can correct that
which i believe this will definitely come later on in a firmware update so really the only bad thing
for me is that it does get very very hot with the most demanding games so for a game like gen shin
impact if i'm going to play for an hour or two hours i would definitely lower the settings down
not run it on the highest visuals even though it can do it or i might it might actually lower the
frame rate from 60 down to 30 just to stop it from getting hot if you do that then it's only
about 45 degrees is what it will get up to so thank you so much for watching my review here
of probably the best gaming phone so far that i've reviewed for the price the black shark 4.