STACK #200 Jun 2021

LIFE TECH FEATURE

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GAME OF PHONES continued any phone this powerful can mean a lot of heat gets generated by all that tech in the palm of your hand, and while ASUS opts for an external clip-on fan, RedMagic’s cooling solution is all on the inside of the device, using a tiny fan, vapour chambers and copper cooling layers to make sure that the phone’s never troubled by anything you can throw at it. The 6 Pro has built-in touch shoulder trigger buttons in its frame, which refresh at 400Hz for

for a while, but the Black Shark 4 marks the debut of these brilliant magnet- powered buttons, which are a smartphone first. Xiaomi has built the Black Shark 4 with a balance of value and performance in mind, leveraging Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 with Adreno 650 graphics – which translates as “great bang for the buck.” Less hot and power- hungry than its sibling in the phones above (it’s liquid-cooled inside using a clever “sandwich” of cooling tech), it still delivers blisteringly fast performance, with its Super AMOLED display running at 144Hz and sensing for touch 720 times per second – which means an incredibly

Genshin Impact

Minecraft Pocket Edition

Xiaomi Black Shark 4

responsive touch delay of just over 8/1000ths of a second. It’s also one of the brightest OLED displays you’ll find on a gaming phone, with a peak brightness of 1300 nits making it ideal for streaming HDR video. Both the main rear cameras and front selfie camera can shoot in HDR as well. When it comes to charging, the beefy 67- watt charger can take the Black Shark 4 from zero to 100 per cent in less than half an hour, with an optional 120-watt option able to charge the phone’s hefty battery to full in a mere 17 minutes. This is also another phone that’s not only holding on to the headphone jack, but wants to make a feature out of it, with full support for hi-res audio at up to 24 bit/192Khz. If you’re looking for a phone that can handle the demands of the latest mobile games, but also want the best video and audio quality you can get for downtime with movies and TV shows, this could be the one to take a closer look at. No matter which one of these three phones grabs your attention, you’re getting huge gaming power for your money – the tech in these devices is cutting-edge and blazingly fast, and when you’re not gaming, you’ve got the most powerful phone in the room for everything from photos to phone calls. Win!

blazingly fast 165Hz refresh rate, easily the best in its class, and delivers in the looks department as well. Not to be outdone, Xiaomi’s Black Shark 4 boasts a feature we’ve not seen on a smartphone before. While there’s been the occasional pop-up selfie camera showing up over the last couple of years, the Black Shark 4 wins all the cleverness points for its dual magnetic pop-up gaming trigger buttons, which are designed to give players more tactile control while gaming, and effortlessly pop away out of sight when using the phone as a, err, phone. There’s always something much more engaging about playing games with buttons you can feel; “virtual” buttons work great, but having a couple of real ones ready to pop out of your phone when you’re ready to play is more of a game-changing feature than you may think. Xiaomi has been quietly perfecting this idea

the kind of responsiveness you need for action games. The need to load, save and send large amounts of data hasn’t been forgotten either, with the Magic Write 2.0 system boosting both read and write speeds from both RAM and ROM by up to 10 times. When you’re dealing with games with big multiplayer maps to load between rounds, that’s something you’ll be glad they paid attention to. All-up, the RedMagic 6 Pro is quite the surprise package – an incredibly well-designed phone that’s right on the cutting edge in terms of its hardware. Its 6.8” AMOLED display has a

Go Widescreen! All of these phones feature screens that are wider than your typical TV or monitor – great for games, but also perfect for watching widescreen movies without black bars at the top and bottom. With great sound and HDR support, these all deliver top-quality streaming of movies, TV – and games!

50 JUNE 2021

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