I am a big fan of the Black Shark 2, it offered a great spec at a reasonable price. While its SoC didn’t really do anything to differentiate it from normal phones there were plenty of features that made it a great gaming phone, including the 240 Hz touchscreen polling rate for the screen and dedicated gaming accessories.
With the launch of the Snapdragon 855 Plus the phone has now been updated to specs superior to that of your normal flagship device.
Black Shark has done more than just add a new chipset inside the phone, it has had multiple tweaks to make it better all round.
The phones comes in a new chassis designed to enable a very comfortable grip during gaming sessions and it is also compatible with Black Shark Gamepad 2.0 Bluetooth add-on that adds 12 buttons, a physical joystick, and a touchpad.
It retains the 6.39-inch AMOLED display which runs at 2340×1080 resolution, with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, 430 nits brightness, 60,000:1 contrast ratio, and 240 Hz touchscreen polling rate.
The Black Shark 2 Pro now features 34.7 ms input latency, down from 43.5 ms in case of the original one.
Along with the new and improved Snapdragon 855 Plus, the SoC is paired with 12 GB of LPDDR4X memory, as well as a 128 GB or 256 GB UFS 3.0 storage device. While the new smartphone uses new internals, it still comes with a 4000 mAh battery.
The SD855+ is the same technology as the older SoC but the Prime CPU core has been increased by 120Mhz from 2.84GHz to up to 2.96GHz, giving a 4.2% boost for single-threaded workloads.
They have also raised the GPU clocks by 87Mhz from 585MHz to 672MHz, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot but it is just shy of a 15% boost and will inevitably make this a popular choice for gaming orientated phones.
The inclusion of UFS 3.0 is interesting, this should make the storage considerably faster, and currently, it is only available on the One Plus 7 Pro.
The camera and battery stay the same with a 48 MP RGB sensor as well as a 12 MP telephoto sensor, which are accompanied by a dual-LED flash, as well as an HDR-enabled 20-MP sensor for selfies on the front. Then a well sized 4000 mAh battery.
Xiami will start shipments of the Black Shark 2 Pro smartphones in black, blue, silver, orange and purple colours. The 128 GB variant will cost CNY 2,999 ($385/£358), whereas the 256 GB version will be priced at CNY 3,499 ($450/£418).
There is no word if or when the new Black Shark 2 Pro will arrive in the UK, however I would expect/hope it arrives in the next couple of months.
Post from: Mighty Gadget – Gadget and Technology Blog
Xiaomi Black Shark 2 Pro officially launched with Snapdragon 855 Plus UFS 3.0
