The Black Shark 2 Review: A Gaming Phone's Existential Crisis
by Andrei Frumusanu on September 25, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Xiaomi
- Snapdragon 855
- Black Shark 2
Battery Life
The Black Shark 2 comes with a 3900/4000mAh battery, and given we’re not seeing any other particularly power hungry components in the phone, we should be expecting the phone to perform relatively well in terms of its battery life.
In the Web Browsing test, indeed we see the BS2 last quite long at 11.83h – among the better devices out there in the market and the second-best Snapdragon 855 device behind the Galaxy S10+. Samsung here still has an advantage due to a more efficient screen, even though it’s also higher resolution.
In PCMark, the BS2 also does quite well. The better efficiency here can be explained by the fact that the phone is slightly more conservatively tuned in terms of its performance, using the more efficient performance states more than more aggressively tuned phones.
Overall, battery life of the Black Shark 2 is very good and lands exactly where you’d expect it to.
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s.yu - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
I'm quite aware of people who never go for the achievements. When my cousin plays Kingdom Rush he DOESN'T EVEN GO FOR ALL 3 STARS.The horror! It's like eating an apple with two or three random bites then throwing away all the rest!
StormyParis - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
Reviewing stuff as part of a for-pay arrangement must require very high-level mental, ethics, ... jiu-jitsu. I'm not sure how long the partnership w/Qualcomm will last, but, as a reader, thanks for the heads up.IUU - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
They are trying to imitate Apple. Too much fluff, so people believe they buy a superior device(it is the price too).So they hope they can make some profit out of thin air.
I hope you should be critical of the iphones in this fashion as well.
They allocate a bigger amount of transistors to the faster cores , so they
can claim supremacy, no matter the fact that on general cpu performance
they are about the same.
No matter that their gpu is anemic and nowhere near snapdragons.
melgross - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Exactly what fluff are you talking about?You really are deliberately ignorant.
edsib1 - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
Another phone review where the benchmarks are all wrong. Put the phone in game mode - it is easily in the top 5 855 based phones in terms of gaming performance.cfenton - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
But is that because it cheats and runs without any thermal limitations when it's in game mode? Personally, I don't want my phone getting hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold.edsib1 - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
But it doesnt get hot. They run at full tilt and dont throttle.Read the other reviews on the internet about these phones. It is Anandtech that is out of step with the other sites.
The gaming phones are basically running in saver mode - unless you turn game mode on.
Exactly the same problem with the review of the Oppo Reno 10x zoom....
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
> But it doesnt get hot. They run at full tilt and dont throttle.I already demonstrated that's not what happens.
> Exactly the same problem with the review of the Oppo Reno 10x zoom....
What's the problem? That phone didn't throttle. It had a performance mode but that's essentially just a cheating button and running all frequencies pegged at max.
edsib1 - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Game mode is not a cheating mode if the phone can maintain that speed. If you run CPU throttle on the Oppo for over 10mins the phone maintains a very high score with game mode engaged (around 15% higher than without).The Exynos 9820 on the other hard throttles hard after a couple of minutes losing about 25% performance.
So why would the game mode that doesnt throttle be more of a cheat mode than the 9820 which throttles hard?
edsib1 - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Reviewing a gaming phone without using gaming mode is like testing an Audi RS6 without putting it into sport mode - pointless.