With 5G and upcoming cloud services like Stadia and xCloud, manufacturers are under pressure to produce the best gaming smartphones.
Yang Sun, the VP for marketing for Black Shark, made this confirmation during a recent interview with Digital News Asia.
Black Shark 2 is the budget gaming phone by Xiaomi. It features a Snapdragon 855 chip, along with a 256GB ROM, 12GB RAM, and 48-megapixel camera. The display is a monster 6.39-inch screen with FHD+ resolution with 60Hz refresh rate.
The battery is only 4000mAh. For instance, the Moto G7 Power and Huawei Mate 20 X, which are standard smartphones, even pack 5000mAh.
Black Shark 2 is competing with ROG Phone 2 from ASUS and the Razer Phone 2.
Yang believes that the trend of smartphones is going toward mobile gaming. Manufacturers would be scrambling to roll out gaming smartphones that are powerful but easy on the pocket as well.
Two technological advancements will disrupt the industry–5G and cloud gaming service.
With high-speed packet data, 5G will drastically improve the online gaming experience. Theoretically, it’s a hundred times faster compared to the current 4G network. The fifth-generation standard potentially caps at 10 gigabits per second compared to the 100 megabits per second for the 4G.
More importantly, for gamers, the 5G network will bring down the latency to around 8-10 milliseconds. Presently, the latency for 4G devices is over 20 ms, probably closer to 50 ms. Latency plays a very important role in seamless online gaming play. For action shooter games like Fortnite, you will be placed at a terrible disadvantage if you have high latency.
Meanwhile, Google’s Stadia and Microsoft’s xCloud are set in revolutionizing cloud gaming. The service will allow you to play your favorite game across multiple devices. You may be playing on your console, turn it off, and resume your game on your mobile phone.
The games will be streamed via the servers of Google or Microsoft. The companies claimed that the specs of the device wouldn’t matter since the games are streamed on their powerful servers.
However, Yang begged to disagree. He said that the device the user will use to stream the games will matter. This is why they are preparing by rolling out the Black Shark 2, which is equipped with powerful hardware.
He said they aim to bring users the right hardware so they can fully maximize 5G and the cloud gaming service.
