Xiaomi Black Shark 4 and 4 Pro arrive with 120W charging, 144Hz displays

Xiaomi’s gaming branch Black Shark introduced today its latest series of gaming smartphones with the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro.

The phones have a lot in common, with differences being in the chipset and camera department, but overall both look like impressive gaming devices.

The Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro are built around a 6.67” E4 AMOLED screen by Samsung. The panel allows for a 144Hz screen refresh rate and 720Hz touch sampling rate - Black Shark expects the gaming to be so intense, it even launched special “e-sports finger gloves” for the most dedicated gamers.

The chipset of the Black Shark 4 is a Snapdragon 870, while its Pro sibling opted for the true flagship platform Snapdragon 888. To handle the extra heat the Black Shark 4 Pro got a two-layer liquid cooling system.

The first layer is directly below the screen, sandwiching the chipset and the other valuable internals with the second layer. Xiaomi says this will increase heat dissipation by 30% and lower the CPU temperature by 18C degrees.

In addition to enabling better sustained performance all this cooling helps maintain the phones' cool when charging. Both the Black Shark 4 and the Black Shark 4 Pro come with 120W fast charging right out of the gate. The battery capacity is 4,500 mAh, and a demo during the event revealed Xiaomi has managed to speed up the charge from 0 to 100% to just 14 minutes 50 seconds.

There’s another major difference between the Pro and the vanilla option - the true flagship comes with Xiaomi RAMDISK feature that uses RAM as disk storage, boosting the performance of a particular app.

The Black Shark 4 Pro has a 64MP main camera and an 8 MP ultra wide one, with an auxilary 5MP sensor sitting alongside those. The regular Black Shark 4 opted for a 48MP main shooter with the other two and the 20MP selfie unit inside a centered punch hole retained.

These gaming devices come with pressure-sensitive shoulder keys that recognize both a light tap and a hard press, letting you do different things with each. There are also two mode switch keys, again on the right side, and the fingerprint scanner/home button is in the middle of all of them. There’s no room for the volume rocker, so it is on the left side.

The user interface is JOYUI 12.5, based on Android 11. It has a bunch of features designed to allocate as much resources as possible to gaming and keep distracting notifications out of the way.

Xiaomi Black Shark 4 • Xiaomi Black Shark 4 Pro

The Black Shark 4 sells in three colors (Magic Black, plain Black, and plain Silver) and four memory configurations. The 6/128 GB version is CNY2,499 ($383/€322), the 8/128 GB is CNY2,699 ($415/€350), 12/128 GB variants goes for CNY2,999 ($460/€385), and the mightiest 12/256 GB phone costs CNY3,299 ($505/€425).

The Black Shark 4 Pro starts from CNY3,999 ($615/€515) for the 8/256 GB version and goes up to CNY4,499 ($690/€580) for 12GB RAM with the same storage. There’s also a 16GB/512GB option for CNY5,299 ($815/€685), but that hasn’t been listed for sale yet. Pre-orders have already begun at Black Shark’s official online store.

Source (both in Chinese)