Recently, we learned that Tencent acquired Black Shark. The Chinese tech giant is going to use the potential of an ex-Xiaomi company to make VR products. This news made many mobile gamers anxious. We mean previously, the Black Shark gaming phones have been considered to be the top-performers in the Android camp. Anyway, the Black Shark 5 series had been designed prior to this statement. So it’s logical that the company announced the lineup will appear on the market according to the schedule. Today is that day. The series includes two models – the base model and the Pro model. Let’s get into details.
Black Shark 5 Pro Features
The Black Shark 5 Pro sports a 6.67-inch OLED flexible straight screen. It also has a refresh rate of 144Hz and a resolution of 2400×1080.
Under the hood, this handset houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 flagship processor. It is the most powerful smartphone at the moment. So that’s quite reasonable why the manufacturer has put it inside this device.
On the back, we can find a 108MP main camera. It is accompanied by a 13MP ultra-wide-angle lens and a 5MP macro sensor.
The battery capacity is 4650mAh, and it supports 120W flash charging. So the smartphone can reach 100% in 15 minutes.
Heat Dissipation
All the aforementioned features sound quite attractive. But frankly, we can find millions of smartphones with such a configuration and even better. But the selling point of this handset is its cooling system. We are dealing with a gaming smartphone. So it ought to remove hot air from the phone to provide a smooth and stable performance. This is essential for gaming smartphones.
The Black Shark 5 Pro has created a new anti-gravity dual VC liquid-cooled heat dissipation system based on the advanced sandwich liquid-cooled heat dissipation structure and direct-contact copper block heat dissipation approach. At the same time, the company has strengthened the capillary force to better overcome the influence of gravity and achieve faster liquid circulation speed.
Moreover, the engineers carefully designed two VC cooling components on the front and back of the key cooling unit of the motherboard. They greatly improve the cooling capacity of the Black Shark 5 Pro.
The total area of the dual VC of the Black Shark 5 Pro has reached an astonishing 5320mm². This is the largest total area of VC liquid cooling in the mobile phone industry. At the same time, the company uses phase-change heat dissipation materials as well as graphene materials. The main heat source and VC are also using the copper block direct contact design. Both the heat dissipation area and the heat dissipation capacity have reached the best level in the industry.
Key Advantages of Black Shark 5 Pro
With the support of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 and a powerful cooling system, the Black Shark 5 Pro’s comprehensive AnTuTu score reached an unprecedented 1,129,716 points. This is an Android flagship with the best benchmark score so far.
Other than that, our protagonist features the industry-leading disk array system 2.0. It comes with an SSD solid-state storage hard drive. It is teamed with UFS3.1 disks for joint debugging. Plus, the RAID software system architecture optimizes the sequence and random read and write capabilities.
In fact, the company has been working on this system for more than 2 years. After myriads of research and testing, the sequential read performance of the disk array system has been improved by 55%; the sequential write performance has been improved by up to 69%; the random read performance has been improved by 194%; the random write performance has been improved by 97%.
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Audio Performance
Another essential feature of the Black Shark 5 Pro is the fully symmetrical hardware combination of two top speakers and four custom high-dynamic microphones. In terms of speakers, they are two 1216 SLS speakers, supporting 0.8mm ultra-large amplitude. They also use equivalent dual 1.5cc large sound chambers.
It is also the first in the industry to use a 4-driver chip solution. The phone comes with two 14V high-power SMART PAs and two audio Boost ICs. They are combined with the industry’s top NLC audio algorithm to provide the best bass effect in games, music, video, and other scenarios.
Not accidentally, the Black Shark 5 Pro reached the top in the DXOMARK audio list, with a total score of 86 points. It is the first in the industry.
Black Shark 5 Features
To start with, the Black Shark 5 is available in four colors: Dark Black, Dawn White, Exploration Gray, and China Aerospace Edition. The China Aerospace Edition is a customized product jointly created by Black Shark Technology and China Aerospace Shenzhou Media. The China Aerospace Edition uses geometric lines combined with a contrasting color design. The design elements from the spaceplane are matched to make the entire fuselage more beautiful.
On the front, our protagonist carries a 6.67-inch Samsung E4 AMOLED high-refresh-rate gaming screen with a resolution of 2400*1080. Also, it has a 1300nit peak brightness, 5000000:1 contrast ratio, 720Hz touch reporting rate, and supports 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz adjustable refresh rates. Of course, the screen supports HDR10+ and SGS low blue light features.
Performance
Unlike the Pro variant, the base model comes with the Snapdragon 870 processor. It is a mid-range Qualcomm chip with many parameters inherited from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The chip uses the 7-nanometer process. With the combination of the LPDDR5+UFS 3.1 storage tandem, it brings an excellent gaming experience.
Apart from this, there are magnetic shoulder buttons and dual-zone pressure feature support on the screen. Specifically, the latter further increases the pressure-sensitive effective area by 16%. So it effectively increases the player’s pressure-sensitive contact range and brings a more extreme pressure-sensitive experience. The dual magnetic power entity shoulder buttons bring players a sense of physical control like the handle buttons. This is a very important feature for mobile gamers.
Camera and Other Specs
The Black Shark 5 sports a 64-megapixel main camera. But there are 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle and 2-megapixel macro lenses as well. The front camera has a 16-megapixel resolution.
The rest of the features include a built-in 4650mAh battery, which supports 120W ultra-fast flash charging. The phone can be fully charged in 16 minutes. Also, it comes with fully symmetrical stereo dual speakers, X-axis linear motor, VC liquid cooling system, Wi-Fi 6, and uses a side-mounted fingerprint identification scanner.
Finally, the phone runs the JOYUI 13 operating system.
Black Shark 5 / Pro Price and Availability
The Pro version’s 8GB+256GB storage option costs 4199 yuan ($661), the 12GB+256GB model is 4699 yuan ($740), and the 16GB+512GB variant comes at 5499 yuan ($866).
As for the vanilla version, there are three memory options to choose from – 8GB+128GB, 12GB+128GB, and 12GB+256GB. They cost 2799 yuan ($441), 2999 yuan ($472), and 3299 yuan ($519), respectively.
