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Xiaomi has entered into the smartphone gaming market with the Black Shark. The smartphone is made by Black Shark Technology, a Chinese gaming company in which Xiaomi has invested. The handset is filled to the brim with top-notch internals thereby allowing it to live up to its gaming tag.
The black and green styling of the handset is reminiscent of the Razer Phone, the other notable gaming smartphone on the market right now. The Black Shark’s design is curvier, with a great amount of attention paid to its finish so that it looks like a true gaming phone. Apart from a black and green, the handset will also be available in a silver and grey color scheme.
There’s a 5.99-inch 21:9 FHD+ IPS LCD display dominating the front of the Black Shark. Compared to other bezel-less devices out there in the market, the Black Shark has a decent amount of top and bottom bezels but they are present for a reason. There’s a fingerprint-cum-home button located at the bottom bezel as well.
Internally, the handset features a Snapdragon 845 chip, 6/8GB RAM, 64/128GB of storage. There’s also an image processing chip from MEMC for sharper colors and improved performance. Xiaomi has used a multi-stage liquid cooling system inside the Black Shark which it claims brings the overall temperatures down by 8° C. All this is powered by a beefy 4000mAh battery.
The Black Shark features a downward facing speaker with the earpiece in the top bezel acting as a tweeter. Since the phone is catered towards gamers, the microphones are gaming-oriented as well. You can use the mic on the phone for voice calls and radio chat whilst playing games.
As for the top and bottom bezels? They allow the Black Shark gamepad to be attached to the handset. The gamepad is similar to what we have seen on the Nintendo Switch and come with their own 340mAh battery. They connect to the phone via Bluetooth and are aimed at hardcore gamers who prefer physical controls. The gamepad also contains a dedicated “Shark” button that dedicates all the resources of the phone towards gaming for optimum performance. The first 50,000 buyers of the Black Shark will get the gamepad for free.
The Black Shark might seem an overkill for mobile games at first glance but in China, mobile gaming is extremely popular. Games like Honor of Kings are massively popular in the country so it makes sense for Xiaomi to launch a gaming smartphone in the country to capitalize on it.
The Black Shark gaming phone is available for pre-order from today itself and goes on sale from April 20. The base variant with 6GB RAM/64GB storage is priced at CNY 2,999 ($480), while the 8GB/128GB variant is priced at CNY 3,499 ($560).
