After spending a couple of weeks with the Black Shark 4, there are some things that the phone does really well, along with a few annoyances. However, as soon as you switch to 2x zoom (digital), the loss of quality is very noticeable. The macro is not as bad as I expected, I was surprised by the beauty of some close-up shots. The manufacturer does not provide an official guarantee for software and security updates.

• The Black Shark debuted over a year ago, so it doesn’t have the newest hardware.
• At night, the Black Shark 5 Pro did not impress me with the dedicated night mode called Super Night Scene.
• The phone comes with three microphones, two stereo speakers, and a 3.5mm headphone jack which we should definitely applaud as we were expecting Xiaomi to drop it as it is with all flagship phones.
• The Black Shark 4 Pro supports 120W Hyper Charge, with the large-capacity 4500mAh dual-cell batteries, which offers the industry-leading charging experience.

Xiaomi tried to sweeten the pot by throwing in the fancy-schmancy 120W HyperCharge support. A 120W brick and a 6A USB-C cable are thoughtfully included in the box. Just like the Xiaomi 11T Pro, you’ve got to use the given cable with the charger to ensure you’re getting the maximum charging speed. As promised, the Black Shark 4 Pro goes from 0% to 100% in a staggering 20 minutes. It does, however, get really hot when charging at full speed. While Shark Chan appears to be a purely decorative (and adorable) persona with no real influence on anything important, Shark Space is a different story. You can add all your games on there for easier management and optimization.

You might not have noticed it, but smartphones process the pictures and videos captured by the camera firmware. As the energy is transferred from the charger to your Xiaomi Black Shark 4 Pro’s battery, some of it escapes in the form of heat from the battery.

But I don’t think it’s a big deal as the phone’s Snapdragon 888 chip is more than fast enough for the latest mobile games. The Black Shark 4 Pro comes with JoyUI, a heavily-skinned version of Xiaomi’s MIUI Android interface. Thanks to its 120W fast-charging feature, the phone’s battery can be topped up in just 15 minutes. Outside of gaming, the phone’s battery stamina is actually better than expected. It lasted almost 13 hours in our video-loop battery test, for example. In short, the Black Shark 4 Pro is a niche but excellent phone designed for mobile gamers. It starts at a relatively affordable S$790 for the 8GB/128GB version.

After all, games can be played on regular smartphones for sure but what about buying a huge and high-end gaming phone? Black Shark 4 Pro fulfills the needs of any gaming freak in his smartphone. The Black Shark 4 Pro has a 6.67 inches, 1080 x 2400 pixels Super AMOLED display with a pixel density of 395 ppi. Coming to cameras, it has a 64 MP rear camera and a 20 MP front camera for selfies. There is a fingerprint sensor present on the Black Shark 4 Pro as well, along with a magnetic field sensor (compass), gyroscope sensor, proximity sensor and accelerometer sensor. It is a dual SIM smartphone with support for 5G, 4G LTE, USB OTG, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS too.