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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Jon Tseng - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
Thanks interesting. I guess that definitely answers the question as to whether the paid Qualcomm partnership had any impact on your ratings (not that it would, knowing AT, I know!).PaulHoule - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
What I found strange about the article is that, unlike most reviews of gaming hardware, there were not any benchmarks for games.Maybe that's because nobody cares how many frames per second you can render Candy Crush which is why they pack it in with Windows so Intel can claim there is a "game" you can play with the integrated graphics.
If there aren't any games that need a gaming phone, why does a gaming phone have to exist? It's like the sound of one hand clapping. isn't it?
Death666Angel - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
I mean, there area pretty intensive games for smartphones out there, think PUBG, Fortnite, racing games. I don't really know if they provide accurate/useful ingame benchmarks and I don't know if there are any FRAPS / FCAT like apps for Android. I don't think we get anything better than 3DMark and GFXBench right now. :) Everything else is non repeatable and therefore of little use.PeachNCream - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
Pretty sure the decision to include Candy Crush is between Microsoft and King. It isn't a decision related to Intel. After all AMD based Windows systems ship with it preloaded as well.crimson117 - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
I think benchmarks were omitted because "the firmware detects benchmarks and disables thermal throttling in order to get better scores." So benchmarks would be meaningless and misleading.s.yu - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
Generally Anandtech's benchmarks should be immune to detection, which is stated in the article.Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
Yes, we bypassed detection for the published scores.raghusa - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
AT was always one of my go to place to get in-depth analysis and reviews. Now that AT is going with PAID partnership route, my view of AT analysis is definitely going to change, will likely look for other reputable sources ....Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
The review content is still fully independently written, and the editorial team including myself have no contact with the sponsor in this regard. In any case this series will come to a closure on Monday.Wardrive86 - Thursday, September 26, 2019 - link
I wish that it was not coming to an end! I very much enjoyed this series.