The Xiaomi Black Shark 2 gaming phone is coming, details revealed in listing

Xiaomi was one of the first OEMs to jump on the gaming phone bandwagon back in 2017. The company followed it up with a direct successor last year, the Black Shark Helo, and could be set to continue down that part with another device soon, in the Black Shark 2. The Black Shark 2 surfaced on popular benchmark AnTuTu a few days ago, revealing a few details of the gaming phone.

Going by the AnTuTu listing, the Black Shark 2—ambitiously codenamed "Skywalker"—will be powered by a Snapdragon 855. Xiaomi already has a Snapdragon 855-powered device, the Mi 9, and any other SoC appearing on the Black Shark 2 would be the real surprise. The listing shows the device running on Android 9.

On board is 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. The Black Shark Helo featured 10 GB of RAM, so that’s the first real surprise. It’s possible, however, that the device shown on AnTuTu is the base model of the Black Shark 2. We expect the top of the line model to ship with up to 12 GB of RAM, and it's not a baseless expectation either, since a Black Shark 2 unit with 12 GB of RAM actually appeared on Geekbench a short while ago.

Finally, the overall AnTuTu score awarded to the unit is a handsome 359,973. That’s a bit below the Mi 9’s score of 371,849 but this is just a test unit and we expect production units to perform better.

The Xiaomi Black Shark 2 is expected to be unveiled on March 18, which means we won’t have to wait much longer for it.