Xiaomi’s gaming phone BlackShark has been teased for a while now and it has just been launched by the Chinese company. As expected, it’s a Razer Phone rival, but with a twist. Oddly enough Xiaomi chose Friday 13 for the release of the phone, not fearing any bad luck.
Xiaomi BlackShark borrows the name from a pair of headphones called BlackShark, which are made by Razer. Maybe it’s a coincidence, or maybe not… Anyway, the new phone comes with a 5.99 inch 18:9 display with Full HD+ resolution and 120 Hz support, like the Razer Phone. The brightness on paper is said to be 550 nits, which is excellent. The same panel offers a 97% coverage for the DCI-P3 color spectre.
On the hardware front – they don’t disappoint. We’ve got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, Adreno 630 GPU, 6 or 8 GB of RAM and 64 or 128 GB of storage. There’s no microSD card slot here, in case you were wondering. The front panel also includes a Home button, with fingerprint scanner embedded. The handset is a dual SIM one, with 4G LTE support, WiFi a/b/g/n/ac dual band, Bluetooth 5.0 and there’s also an USB Type-C port here.
An interesting feature highlighted by Xiaomi is liquid cooling, used to avoid overheating. On the camera front, Xiaomi BlackShark provides a 20 MP front shooter for selfies and a main dual camera, with 12 MP + 20 MP shooters. There’s a dual tone flash, HDR, PDAF, Bokeh and more. As expected, the battery is generous, at 4000 mAh and it comes with fast charging via Quick Charge 3.0.
The phone measures 9.25 mm in thickness, weighs 190 grams and has a pretty rugged-looking design. A special joystick is provided separately by Xiaomi, priced at $28. It comes with a thumbstick and some action and shoulder buttons. It’s a one sided accessory, not a dual sided one. Xiaomi BlackShark costs $477 for the 6 GB RAM model and $557 for the 8 GB RAM one.
