Gadgetory

This gaming smart phone video is sponsored by Rovio Entertainment with their Angry Birds 2 smart phone game. Angry Birds 2 is the updated version of the classic Angry Birds. It still has the same normal slingshot bird flying projectiles that you used to enjoy. But now it has more variables and ways to make the bird stronger, like special hats. When you go to play the map and compete with other players worldwide, you can level up your birds by collecting hats and special feathers, or play in the Tower pf Fortune to get special awards quickly. I remember playing the original version of this game back in the day for hours on end, so it's pretty nostalgic to have it back...and it's still free. Angry Birds 2 is one of those games that you can just chill with for a few minutes for a quick level or two, or get sucked in and play for hours as well. I'll leave a link in the description you can download and get Angry Birds 2 a try. And thanks to Rovio Entertainment for sponsoring this portion of the video. The Black Shark 2 is one of the cheaper gaming phones on the market right now, but still boasts some pretty impressive specs and eye-catching glass and metal exterior design. Today we'll get a close up look at how the LED sidebars integrate, and check out the internal direct touch liquid cooling that Black Shark has been raving about. Let's get started. [Intro] Taking apart the Black Shark 2 is pretty rough. Instead of a non-essential rear glass panel coming off, this phone starts with a screen removal, which is both good and bad. Good – if the screen is the only thing you need to replace, but bad if you're trying to fix basically anything else. The screen is set down inside the subtle green and black metal frame. But once the initial penetration is made down near the lower stereo speaker, the adhesive lets the screen pull up and away fairly easily since there's no super strong water proofing around the edges. The only safe place to insert a tool around the edge is under the black colored paint. If anything touches the display portion of the panel, it's instant kablooey for the screen. The display can be replaced by someone who knows what they're doing in about 10 minutes, which is pretty awesome. Flipping open the screen like a book, we get our first glace at the massive amounts of copper under the glass, and the quite prominent optical fingerprint scanning camera placed under the glass screen. You can see how the light from my S8 Plus shines through the hole in the display that the fingerprint scanner works through. One screw allows the silver screen connector bracket to remove, and then the screen can unplug like a little Lego. The display on the Black Shark 2 is an AMOLED, meaning that there's no back light. This allows the whole thing to be super thin – exactly like what we saw on the Apple Watch 4. I wish more phones had a screen removal that was as easy as this. Unfortunately for us though, the rest of this phone is a complete chaotic unorganized nightmare inside...so buckle up. There are 21 Phillips head screws holding the mid plate to the rear body. Other phones we've seen with a mid-plate like this, like on the Nokia's or the HTC 10, are super incredibly rigid, which explains why the Black Shark 2 performed so well in my durability test. Finally shimmying out that massive mid-plate full of copper, we see why Black Shark calls this Direct Touch. Most smart phones don't have their processors exposed, but here, the main Qualcomm 855 processor has the thermal paste directly applied to the top, which rests right up against the copper metal heat sink – exactly like we see on computers. I'll peel back the covering over the copper so we can see more of the thermal dissipation system. There is a ton of metal in here. The Black Shark 2 probably has just as much copper as the Razer Phone 2 – just not all combined into one waterbed style heat pipe. There are multiple layers to the coolant. The main bulk of it is a thick copper pad that's directly above the processor. There is a smaller normal heat pipe, like something we've seen inside of the Galaxy Phones. It's down over the lower circuit board and charging port, and has it's own thermal paste. It's also connected to that same larger phone size piece of thin copper on the top. It's a pretty ingenious design – especially for the price. As we go deeper, the rest of the phone looks like it was designed and put together by a caffeinated rabbit, with wires and ribbons all over the place. Nothing's really in the right spot – not even the battery connector, which should be unplugged first, it's hidden underneath other ribbon cables. It's a pretty similar design to the old HTC 10, which won the Least Repairable Smart Phone Award a few years ago. After unplugging a bunch of stuff, we finally get to the camera units. Both are housed in the same metal block. A 48 megapixel main camera with a 12 megapixel 2x optical zoom telephoto camera. Neither of which have optical image stabilization. The top motherboard has two screws holding it in place, and then it can kind of lift out, but still has yet another ribbon connection and two wire cables attached to the underside of the board. Pretty complex. Here's an up-close look at the thermal paste over the processor. You might be thinking to yourself, 'Hey, that battery's upside down.' And yep, it is. There are two magical pull tabs down at the bottom under the battery. The first pull tab broke, but the second pull tab was...[stretching sounds]...very successful. One out of two ain't bad. I'll commence the Pry of Shame and lift the battery out of the cavity. It's a large 4000 milliamp hour capacity that says 'do not remove'. Oops. The pull tabs under the battery are a pretty fantastic invention by the way. As the adhesive stretches out, it loses it's stickiness and allows the battery to basically fall out of the phone without any force, as long as the pull tabs don't break of course...which is pretty common. Each side of the metal black Shark 2 has it's own LED battery level indicator light as it's charging. But even with the large cutouts in the metal frame for the LEDs, the phone is not structurally compromised. The LEDs themselves are on a thin little strip of ribbon that shines the light into a super thick, cloudy, plastic diffuser. Since the LEDs are pointing inwards, it's probably why the light seems a little dim at times, but it's still a very interesting concept, and I'm glad that Black Shark is over here doing cool stuff to stand out. The bottom circuit board has two screws along with some wire cables, and then the circuit board can be removed, exposing the ultra large loudspeaker housing. I'll cut this guy open to see if the whole thing is hollow to help sound resonate...but it's not. Just the bulky part is the speaker component. The charging port comes out next. It's the last thing to come out of the phone. It's right next to the headphone jack that doesn't exist. I still think it's pretty crazy that a gaming phone can be built without a headphone jack. But yeah, there it is. Even though the Black Shark 2 is a super complicated intricate piece of hardware, I am a fan. I'll slide the battery into place between the side rail LEDs. And even though the whole thing isn't easy to repair and there's no water resistance, it does have a really easy to replace screen, which luckily, is the main thing people usually want to fix. If anything else breaks or stops working inside the phone though...good luck. I'll plug the ribbons and wires into the bottom of the motherboard, and then gently set that into place in the phone frame while connecting the plethora of other extension ribbons and wires. Do I even want to take the Black Shark 2 apart again? No. But for the price and the amount of internal copper cooling, I think they've done pretty well and it's pretty fair. Everything still works, so I'll screw in the 21 screws and seal it up for the last time. Gaming phones seem to be the frontrunners in design and cooling, and just doing awesome things in general. So I want to check more of them out. Are there any other gaming phones out there that I haven't reviewed yet that you want to see the insides of? Let me know down in the comments. Come hang out with me on Twitter and Instagram. And thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.