Black Shark 4 Pro review: Great for games

Camera performance has never been an area where gaming phones have stock ROMs done too well. We don’t expect that to change, but there is a triple camera setup. There are a few minor differences here, with the Black Shark 4 having a 48-megapixel main sensor and the 4 Pro using a 64-megapixel main sensor. An 8-megapixel ultra-wide and 5-megapixel macro and 20-megapixel selfie shooter complete the camera package. Unlike the other gaming phones that we’ve seen released in 2021, the Black Shark 4 doesn’t try to pack an enormous battery.

It maintains the sleek design of a standard smartphone, but upon closer inspection, you’ll find a powerful machine for the gamer on the go. For $50 extra, you could get the RedMagic 7 with additional power and a faster display refresh rate, all of which is worth far more than that additional 50 bucks. But in picking that, you’ll get 65W charging rather than the full 120W of the 4 Pro. In the Geekbench 5 test, the 4 Pro hit a multi-core score of 3,742 and a 3DMark Wild Life average frame rate of 35.2 FPS.

• If you are out and about using your phone a lot, provided you’re near a plug, then you can keep going for as long as you need.
• The front camera is a 20MP sensor with an f/2.2 sensor covered with a 5P lens.
• This is a rather consistent theme with the space-like feel picked by the manufacturer this year.
• Almost a year after the initial announcement of the Black Shark 4 Pro in China, the smartphone is set to come to UK shores.
• With expected upgrades when it comes to gaming, Asus did surprise me with a quality primary camera this year in the ROG Phone 6.
• So far, I haven’t faced any major issues with JOYUI and I hope it stays that way.

Portrait mode produces satisfactory results, though the shots aren’t as sharp and the colors aren’t as accurate. The subject also needs to be more vibrant and clearer, especially the outlines that tend to get blurry. Since the camera app is an exact replica of the one all Xiaomi phones use, there are a ton of fun filters and tints to play around with. The Black Shark 4 Pro runs JOYUI 12.5, which is a re-skin of MIUI 12.5 based on Android 11. The only notable differences in JOYUI 12.5 are the green accent colors and the extra gaming features baked into the Black Shark phone. That’s fine with me because MIUI 12.5 is fantastic in terms of looks and usability alike, bringing a wide array of great features to the table.

• It is baffling that most of Xiaomi’s own mid-rangers have larger batteries than the Black Shark 4 Pro.
• But it’s just a couple of companies making powerful yet very similar (and, apparently, sometimes very fragile) phones that aren’t really worth the effort of tracking down — even for the most die-hard of mobile gamers.
• Red Magic 6S Pro.
• If you’re wondering why I didn’t include any Night mode selfie samples, here’s the 411.
• Unfortunately, we find the same problems as on MIUI such as ads in native applications (even the file manager).

This way the users can chose freely between different ID4me providers and can also change the provider anytime. In both cases, the times touted by the manufacturer proved to be accurate. In everyday use, I was able to run the game Apex Legends Mobile at a constant 60 FPS with graphics and framerate set to 4 out of 5. Apex Legends is a not very well optimized game, so it is very resource intensive. But with the Black Shark 5 Pro, the experience was much smoother than on my OnePlus 10 Pro, for example.