Xiaomi Black Shark 2 with Snapdragon 855 SoC expected to debut in April

Xiaomi launched its first gaming smartphone back in April 2018 and named it Black Shark. As we inch closer towards April 2019, Xiaomi's Black Shark team is all pumped up to launch the Black Shark 2.Over the past weekend, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun asked Black Shark fans to share their expectations and suggestions for the Black Shark team to work on. The Weibo post was reposted by Xiaomi’s Product Director, Wang Teng Thomas who replied saying that he recently had a glimpse of the new Black Shark smartphone and found it “very cool.”[caption id="attachment_5438681" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

The Xiaomi Black Shark Helo. Image: Xiaomi China[/caption]While this does not give away any information as far as specifications go, but does indicate that the company is now prepping up a new gaming smartphone. Given the fact that the original Black Shark was launched in the month of April, the Black Shark 2 is also expected to be launched around the same period.A smartphone listed as the Black Shark Skywalker was also recently spotted testing on Geekbench. The smartphone was seen to be powered by "msmnile" chipset which is claimed to be a codename for Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 855 SoC.The listing also shows the gaming phone to come with 8 GB of RAM and run on Android 9 Pie. In the single-core and multi-core tests, the phone scored 3,494 and 11,149 points respectively.Is it coming to India this time? We will have to wait and see if Xiaomi has plans of launching their gaming phones in India this year. Asus recently launched the ROG phone in India and while it is indeed a great smartphone for heavy gamers, it certainly doesn't bring a lot to the table if you compare it to more affordable flagships like the OnePlus 6T.