High-quality photo and video files tend to get very big, very fast. Because of that, I consider this a good camera, but I wouldn’t use it to try and capture birds mid-flight at night.
There’s no wireless charging support, but there is 120W fast wired charging with the included adapter – a frankly astonishing rate than can juice up your phone to full from zero in as little as 15 minutes. When you can charge up a phone that quickly, the battery life isn’t quite so important. Just about anything looks great on the display of the Black Shark 4 Pro, including photos, websites, movies, and of course games (that 144Hz refresh rate really helps games fly by with very little motion blur).
They’re thicker than your average flagship phone due to bigger batteries, a heat sink, and several other components that you probably won’t find in phones made by Google, Apple, or Samsung. They’re proofs of concept that you can get laptop-tier specs into a pocket-sized device. If only a company made a device with more focused software that doesn’t feel so pressured to lean (in Black Shark’s case, very awkwardly) into the stereotypical lane of what it thinks a gamer wants free in phone software. If you’re using an iPhone, you should get the excellent Backbone One controller to attach to your phone. I recognize that there’s an audience of mobile gamers who rely solely on touch controls. And for that one key area, gaming phones like this one can’t be beaten. Meant to be a kind of assistant that helps with getting you acquainted with this phone’s many settings, the anime Shark Chan character is a feature that stands out on an otherwise ho-hum gaming phone.
Without a single morsel of doubt, I can confidently recommend the Black Shark 4 for gamers. The physical trigger buttons were a pleasant experience and the device didn’t even break a sweat on max settings on high refresh rates. The raw power of the Snapdragon 870 is strong but it definitely won’t beat the likes of the Snapdragon 888+.
