Sometimes it feels like phone manufacturers are trying to transition to mobile gamers by slapping RGB lighting on an otherwise black phone crammed with general components, but with the Black Shark 4, Xiaomi is trying something new: add built-in tactile shoulder buttons that can make a real difference.
Unlike other gaming phones such as the Red magic 6 and Asus’ ROG Phone 5 With touch sensors on the side, the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro come with real physical buttons that you can use as triggers in landscape mode. Xiaomi says the triggers can tell the difference between pressing lightly and hard, and can even lock when not in use to prevent accidental pressing. Some might call me a traditionalist, but especially when it comes to mobile games, sometimes it’s just nice to have real tactile controls instead of relying purely on touch.
T.The Black Shark 4 has a fairly tame design (at least on gaming phones) with a back triple lens camera module and a small RGB light on the back, although it’s unclear if that screaming X-themed paint job is optional or not on every model.
Both models have a 6.67-inch AMOLED display made by Samsung with a 144 Hz refresh rate and a responsive touch sampling rate of 720 Hz (the highest touch sampling rate seen on a phone so far), along with super-fast 120-watt wired charging and a decent 4500 mAh battery, which Xiaomi claims can be charged from dead to full in less than 15 minutes.
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If you want top performance, unfortunately you should opt for the more expensive Black Shark 4 Pro, as it has a more powerful Snapdragon 888 processor (the standard Black Shark 4 gets a SD 870) and a dedicated RAMDISK that allows the phone to use memory like traditional storage, which Xiaomi says can significantly improve the performance of a specific app.
Others specifications include 8 GB or 12 GB RAM and up to 256 GB storage, with a dedicated 16 GB RAM and 512 GB configuration reserved for the top-specific Black Shark 4 Pro. You also get a dedicated 3.5mm headphone jack and a bunch of software-based gaming tweaks like performance enhancements and do not disturb settings built into JOYUI 12.5, which is based on Android 11.
W.he Chinese prices for the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro from just 2,499 yuan (about $ 385) and 3,999 yuan (about $ 615), respectively, Xiaomi’s new gaming phone can get a pretty good price, to. ThThe Red Magic 6 begins around $ 585 and the ROG Phone 5 is coming in even higher around $ 950 to start.
W.he three new gaming phones that are debuting In the past few weeks, mobile gamers should soon have a lot more options when it comes to their favorite mobile.