Here are the most powerful Android smartphones of the first half of 2021

The official account of the Master Lu benchmark on the Weibo social network has information about the most powerful smartphones released from January to June 2021. The first places, as expected, do not go to flagship models for ordinary users, but to solutions for gamers.

The top three included Black Shark 4 Pro from Xiaomi, ROG 5 Mirage from ASUS, and Nubia Red Magic 6 Pro from ZTE. All three are powered by Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 888 chipsets. The leading Black Shark 4 Pro model scored a record 938,991 points.

In order to get the most out of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Mobile Platform, the Black Shark 4 Pro uses a special second generation multi-layer liquid cooling system.

In addition to the top three, the ranking of the best includes all kinds of Vivo, OPPO, iQOO, Xiaomi, Realme, OnePlus and Redmi models – Vivo X60 Pro +, iQOO 7, Xiaomi 11 Ultra, OPPO Find X3 Pro, Realme GT, OnePlus 9 Pro, Redmi K40 Pro and other flagship solutions and even mid-range smartphones.

Gartner has recently released statistics on the global smartphone market in the first quarter of this year. The industry showed significant growth, which indicates a rapid recovery from last year’s coronavirus strike.

Shipments of smartphone devices in the period from January to March inclusive amounted to 377.99 million units. This is a quarter – 26% – more compared to the first quarter of 2020; when shipments were equal to 300.04 million units.

The market leader is Samsung with a market share of approximately 20.3%. In second place is Apple with 15.5%, and Xiaomi closes the top three with 12.9%.

Next come the Chinese companies Vivo and Oppo: each of them controls 10.2% of the world market. All of the remaining smartphone vendors collectively hold 30.9% of the global industry.

If we look at the cellular market as a whole, including conventional mobile phones, quarterly shipments climbed 22%. It is also noted that all the leading market players showed significant growth in sales on an annualized basis.

“The improvement in consumer outlook, sustained learning and working from home, along with pent-up demand from 2020 boosted sales of smartphones in the first quarter. Consumers started spending on discretionary items as the pandemic situation improved in many parts of the world and markets opened up,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. “However, one cannot ignore that the base for comparison is also lower in 2020, than it was in 2019. This explains the double-digit growth.”