Black Shark 3 & Black Shark 3 Pro Go Official: Powerful Performance & Beefy Battery

Xiaomi’s sub-brand Black Shark has finally launched its new gaming-centric Black Shark 3 & Black Shark 3 Pro - two of its new gaming-centric smartphones in China. In addition, they are also the first smartphones developed based on a partnership between Black Shark & Tencent Games, helping deliver the best gaming experience.

Design

Like their predecessors, the Black Shark 3 & Black Shark 3 Pro still features the same design at the back, with sharp curves. The most notable change on the two smartphones is the camera placement and camera module, which is symmetrical with the "triangle" in the lower half.

Both of them have a triple camera setup at the back. The telephoto sensor is replaced with an ultra-wide-angle unit and the brand also adds a depth sensor on the setup for portrait shots. 

The biggest difference in design between the two smartphones is that the Pro version has two physical buttons with tactile feedback on its right spine, while it is not available on the standard model.

Hardware Specifications

The Black Shark 3 sports a 6.67” AMOLED display, FHD+ resolution and a 20: 9 aspect ratio. The screen has a refresh rate of 90Hz, a 270Hz touch sampling rate as well as supports 100 percent DCI-P3 color gamut & 500 nits brightness.

Meanwhile, the Pro model flaunts an AMOLED panel with a bigger 7.1-inch size, supports QHD+ resolution and an aspect ratio of 19.5:9.

Under the hood, both devices are driven by Qualcomm's most powerful Snapdragon 865 chipset, aided by up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB UFS 3.0 storage. In addition, they also support dual-mode 5G and Wi-Fi 6, with a special mode that helps combine these two connections to increase bandwidth.

Moving to the back, the Black Shark 3 & Black Shark 3 Pro are equipped with a triple camera cluster housed in a "triangular" module with identical specs. This camera setup consists of a 64MP main camera with f / 1.8 aperture, a 13MP ultra-wide angle sensor with f / 2.25 aperture and a 120-degree field of view and a 5MP depth sensor with f / 2.0 aperture. On the front, the two smartphones both get a 20MP camera for selfies with f/2.2 aperture.

The Black Shark 3 packs a 4,720mAh battery, while the Pro version has a beefier 5,000mAh battery. Both smartphones support 65W quick charging tech that is claimed to take only 38 minutes to fully charge the phone to 100 percent.

Gaming features

The Black Shark 3 Pro comes with two physical buttons with tactile feedback its right spine. As per the brand's announcement, each button has a length of 21mm & 1.5mm key travel, with a durability of over 1 million clicks. Unfortunately, this feature is missing on the vanilla model.

They are both features a liquid cooling system called “Sandwich Cooling System". Under the hood, Black Shark said that it used a dual-battery design with a 116mm long motherboard in the middle, together with components that can get hot during use such as 5G modem and CPU.

In addition, there are two heat sinks located on the front and back of the motherboard, and an additional layer of graphite to improve heat dissipation performance.

Price & Availability

The Black Shark 3 will go on sale in China from 6th March with a price of CNY 3,499 (around Rs. 36,900) for the 8GB of RAM + 128GB storage variant. Meanwhile, the 12GB of RAM + 128GB storage version is priced at CNY 3,799 (around Rs. 40,000) and the 12GB RAM + 256GB storage model is priced at CNY 3,999 (around Rs. 42,200).

For the Black Shark 3 Pro, this smartphone will go on sale on 17th March, with a price of CNY 4,699 (around Rs. 49,600) for 8GB RAM + 256GB storage variant. The top-end variant with 12GB of RAM + 256GB storage costs CNY 4,999 (around Rs. 52,700).

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