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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Average James - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
You can swipe to pop up Game Studio menu overlay to set performance level. It has Auto, 1~4(Max) levels for various dynamic core/clock governors as well as additional "thermal throttling level" options.Detection is only for Auto performance level and pretty much decent. It even has overlay CPU Clock/FPS counter to check current performance. You can always gear up performance level and save it per each App. Like you might want to save bettery time by turning off some graphic options in the game, and then you can set lower performance level for overall endurance. Or pitch up to maximum level with GPU overclock to beat every handset in the market.
s.yu - Saturday, September 28, 2019 - link
" I saw device skin temperatures rise to a peak of 58°C before I decided to call it quits and stop the app – the phone had gotten so hot I couldn’t comfortably hold it anymore."I don't think just increasing the thermal allowance is the solution.
Chad - Saturday, September 28, 2019 - link
Thanks for a great review, sir.