After months of stasis, Black Shark is finally back with a pair of attractive gaming flagships known as the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro which will be taking on the likes of the ASUS ROG Phone 5 and Nubia Red Magic 6 series devices.
Both the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro shares an identical design and a largely similar specs sheet except for some notable differences in their underlying processor and their main camera.
On the outside, both devices sport a 6.67” AMOLED display that offers a FHD+ screen resolution, as well as a smooth 144Hz refresh rate and up to 720Hz touch sampling rate. Although the devices have an AMOLED display, but they opted for a side-mounted fingerprint scanner instead of an in-display one.
Under the hood, the vanilla Black Shark 4 is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon 870 chipset which is also found in many prominent smartphone models including the recently unveiled POCO F3. The Black Shark 4 Pro on the other hand, gets a slightly more powerful Snapdragon 888 chipset instead.
On top of that, its also worth noting that the Black Shark 4 Pro has a speedier 6,400MHz LPDDR5 RAM as compared to the slightly slower 5,500MHz LPDDR5 RAM used in the vanilla Black Shark 4.
For photography, both the devices feature a triple-camera system at the back. Although the Black Shark 4 Pro comes equipped with a 64 megapixels primary shooter, but the vanilla Black Shark 4 settles for a slightly toned-down 48 megapixels shooter instead.
As for the other two cameras, they share the same 8 megapixels ultra-wide camera and a 5 megapixels macro camera. In fact, their similarities extend to the 20 megapixels selfie camera as well.
To deliver a more immersive gaming experience, both the devices also come with mechanical shoulder buttons, dual stereo speakers, Z-axis linear vibration motor, as well as an impressive liquid cooling system to ensure a smooth and consistent gaming experience.
Moving on, the Black Shark 4 and 4 Pro are backed by a respectable 4,500mAh battery which carries support for 120W fast-charging support. As usual, both devices are shipped with JOYUI 12.5 based on Android 11 out of the box.
For those who’re interested, the vanilla Black Shark 4 is priced at 2,499 Yuan (US$384), 2,699 Yuan (US$414), 2,999 Yuan (US$460) and 3,299 Yuan (US$506) respectively for its 6GB+128GB, 8GB+128GB, 12GB+128GB and 12GB+256GB variants.
The Black Shark 4 Pro on the other hand, will set you back with 3,999 Yuan (US$614), 4,499 Yuan (US$691) and 5,299 Yuan (US$814) respectively for its 8GB+256GB, 12GB+256GB and 16GB+512GB variants.