Black Shark, Xiaomi’s gaming arm, today introduced the latest series of smartphones playing with the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro.
Many in the phones are fairly common, with differences in the chipset and camera segment, but overall both look like amazing gaming devices.
The Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro are built around Samsung’s 6.67 ”E4 AMOLED screen. The panel allows for a 144Hz screen refresh rate and a 720Hz touch sampling level – Black Shark expects the game to be so intense, it has even launched “e-sports finger gloves” for the most avid gamers.
The chipset of the Black Shark 4 is a Snapdragon 870, while its brother Pro chose the flagship true Snapdragon 888 platform. To handle the extra heat the Black Shark 4 Pro got a dual-mode cooling system return.
The first row is just below the screen, sandwiching the chipset and the other valuable immigrants with the second row. Xiaomi claims that this will increase heat dissipation by 30% and reduce CPU temperature by 18C.
In addition to enabling better stable performance all this cooling helps to keep the phones cool while charging. Both the Black Shark 4 and the Black Shark 4 Pro come with 120W charging quickly out of the gate. Battery capacity is 4,500 mAh, and a demo during the event revealed that Xiaomi has accelerated the charge from 0 to 100% to just 14 minutes 50 seconds.
There’s another big difference between the Pro and the vanilla option – the actual flagship comes with a feature that allows it to store parts of the RAM that you don’t currently need on the storage, forcing the phone to behaving as if it had extra RAM.
The Black Shark 4 Pro has a 64MP main camera and an ultra 8 MP wide one, with a 5MP auxilary sensor sitting next to those. The regular Black Shark 4 opted for a 48MP main shooter with the other two and the 20MP selfie unit inside a centralized punch hole retained.
These game machines come with pressure-sensitive shoulder keys that recognize both a light tap and a hard press, allowing you to do different things with each one. There are also two mode turn keys, again on the right side, and the fingerprint scanner / home button is in the middle of all of them. There’s no room for the volume rocker, so it’s on the left.
The user interface is JOYUI 12.5, based on Android 11. It has a handful of features designed to allocate so many resources for gaming and to keep calls out of the way.
Xiaomi Black Shark 4 • Xiaomi Black Shark 4 Pro
The Black Shark 4 sells in three colors (Magic Black, plain Black, and plain Silver) and four memory resolutions. The 6/128 GB version is CNY2,499 ($ 383 / € 322), the 8/128 GB is CNY2,699 ($ 415 / € 350), 12/128 GB changes will go for CNY2,999 ($ 460 / € 385), and the most powerful 12/256 GB phone costs CNY3,299 ($ 505 / € 425).
The Black Shark 4 Pro starts from CNY3,999 ($ 615 / € 515) for the 8/256 GB version and goes up to CNY4,499 ($ 690 / € 580) for 12GB RAM with the same storage. There’s also a 16GB / 512GB option for CNY5,299 ($ 815 / € 685), but that hasn’t been listed for sale yet. Pre-orders have already started at the official Black Shark online store.
Source (both in Chinese)