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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Flunk - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
I'd take "gaming" phones more seriously if they actually had better hardware instead of just having obnoxious styling like this thing. I feel like that won't happen because of the way SoCs are developed, so we'll just see more of these cynical products.wrkingclass_hero - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
So it has finally come to paid reviews... this will not end wellAndrei Frumusanu - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
It will end come Monday.Galcobar - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Xiaomi might agree with your sentiment, since Qualcomm paid for a review which called out deceptive practices, poor design, and significant under-performance by a Qualcomm client. Clearly, the payment did not include guarantees of positive coverage or control over the published results. Xiaomi is probably wishing this review hadn't happened, but it does seem to establish the Independence of Anandtech editorial staff to publish a negative review even when sponsored.PeachNCream - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Pretty much this stuff. It's really hard to question AT's integrity with this particular paid review given the results do not paint the phone in question in a very good light. Will that always be the case? Dunno, but I think probably, yes it will.Imran-Shaikh - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
What benefits AT had through these paid reviews?Money or anything else?
Thanks in advance.
Badelhas - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
What do you mean?Average James - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
I just ran Slingshot Extreme Unlimited on my own BlackShark 2 with explicitly turned off thermal throttling and maximum speed setting [4] as Gamer Studio allows to tune the option.With GPU overlocked via Caller hidden menu, I marked 7100~ish Graphics and 4100-ish Physics which seems legit to its clock setting. While that, the temp marked through 35~38C.
And then, I voluntary set Gamer Studio level to [2] which actively uses Silver Cores for battery and heats for non-3D heavy games. the result is similar to the article.
So I wonder, Mr. Andrei might misunderstood about CPU/GPU governor stuff. On Auto setting, it seems natural that SW detects what kind of game or apps which requires how much 3D/CPU power to get most favorable results. Like nowdays modern VGA drivers are doing.
Average James - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
I can understand you're blaming detecting benchmarks software to turn off thermal throttling as a reviewer. It's generally evil thing to trick customers. BUT this device offers various performance levels through it's exclusive Gamer Studio menu and even allows to set thermal throttling level if you want.So what I cannot get from your article is, it doesn't talk about it's real performance. This is just complaining about "Poor performance in Auto perf setting if an App is not registered properly as it uses lower performance (seems level 2) level."
s.yu - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
"if an App is not registered properly"If "real" performance mandates that apps "register" properly, how can you ensure that every game is registered properly then, if "registration" doesn't depend on a load detection?