A working Wi-Fi connection is an essential part of owning an Amazon Echo. Without it you can’t really do, well, anything. So when it comes to the time you get a new wireless router, for example, it’s important to get moved over as quickly as possible. Especially if your Echo and Alexa are central to your smart home setup.
Fortunately, changing to a new Wi-Fi network is straightforward and all you need is your phone and the Alexa app. Detailed below are the steps that apply to all Amazon Echo smart speakers as well as the Echo Show and Echo Spot devices with displays.
How to change the Wi-Fi network on an Amazon Echo
Enable Bluetooth on your phone and open the Alexa App.
Trigger in the settings under Wi-Fi Network and follow on-screen prompts.
For Echo Show and Echo Spot, use the built-in display to access the Settings menu.
For this, you’ll want to make sure that you’re in the same room as the Echo and that Bluetooth is enabled on your phone. Then, open up the Alexa app and follow these steps.
Select Devices.
Select Echo & Alexa.
Select your device.
Select Settings.
Select Wi-Fi Network and follow the on-screen instructions.
These may vary from device to device, but the basic steps involve holding down the action button on the speaker for around 15 seconds. From here you’re going to be waiting for the light to go orange before continuing.
The Alexa app puts your Amazon Echo into its setup mode and then pairs it to your new Wi-Fi network. Once complete, you’ll hear a message from your Amazon Echo and the orange light will have been replaced by a blue one.
How to change the Wi-Fi network on an Amazon Echo Show or Echo Spot
If you’re using an Amazon Echo device with a display then the process is a whole lot simpler. All you will need to do is to open the settings, usually by swiping down from the top and tapping the cog on the display.
Next, find the Network menu, open it and then simply select the Wi-Fi network you want to connect to. Since you have an on-screen keyboard, you’ll enter passwords here, too.
The Amazon Echo is the best all-around smart speaker for most people with a nice design, great sound and the immense power of the Alexa ecosystem at its disposal.
A working Wi-Fi connection is an essential part of owning an Amazon Echo. Without it you can’t really do, well, anything. So when it comes to the time you get a new wireless router, for example, it’s important to get moved over as quickly as possible. Especially if your Echo and Alexa are central to your smart home setup.
Fortunately, changing to a new Wi-Fi network is straightforward and all you need is your phone and the Alexa app. Detailed below are the steps that apply to all Amazon Echo smart speakers as well as the Echo Show and Echo Spot devices with displays.
How to change the Wi-Fi network on an Amazon Echo
Enable Bluetooth on your phone and open the Alexa App.
Trigger in the settings under Wi-Fi Network and follow on-screen prompts.
For Echo Show and Echo Spot, use the built-in display to access the Settings menu.
For this, you’ll want to make sure that you’re in the same room as the Echo and that Bluetooth is enabled on your phone. Then, open up the Alexa app and follow these steps.
Select Devices.
Select Echo & Alexa.
Select your device.
Select Settings.
Select Wi-Fi Network and follow the on-screen instructions.
These may vary from device to device, but the basic steps involve holding down the action button on the speaker for around 15 seconds. From here you’re going to be waiting for the light to go orange before continuing.
The Alexa app puts your Amazon Echo into its setup mode and then pairs it to your new Wi-Fi network. Once complete, you’ll hear a message from your Amazon Echo and the orange light will have been replaced by a blue one.
How to change the Wi-Fi network on an Amazon Echo Show or Echo Spot
If you’re using an Amazon Echo device with a display then the process is a whole lot simpler. All you will need to do is to open the settings, usually by swiping down from the top and tapping the cog on the display.
Next, find the Network menu, open it and then simply select the Wi-Fi network you want to connect to. Since you have an on-screen keyboard, you’ll enter passwords here, too.
The Amazon Echo is the best all-around smart speaker for most people with a nice design, great sound and the immense power of the Alexa ecosystem at its disposal.
Black Shark is a gaming smartphone brand that’s been around for a while. It’s backed by Xiaomi (not owned by, as the company fervently reminds the tech community) and typically packs high-end hardware in a more affordable package. Now the Black Shark 5 Pro is here, and it’s more of the same with physical triggers that can be mapped to touch inputs to help your game.
If you’re looking for a powerful smartphone that looks decent, then the Black Shark 5 Pro might well be up your alley. However, it might also be worth waiting for what’s to come after the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 before taking the plunge on a gaming smartphone, as the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 promises to fix a lot of the shortcomings of the preceding flagship chipset.
With the Black Shark 5 Pro, there are a lot of problems that you mightn’t be able to get over, and that includes poor battery life, intense heat, and the lack of a headphone jack. If you’re interested to learn more, then read on.
The Black Shark 5 Pro is the latest gaming phone from the Xiaomi-backed company, but there are a lot of problems with it that may not necessarily command the price tag.
About this review: Black Shark sent us the Black Shark 5 Pro for review. The company did not have any input into the contents of this review.
Black Shark 5 Pro: Design
Not an overly “gamer” look
Camera barely protrudes
Comfortable to hold
The Black Shark 5 Pro’s design can simply be described as “gamer” — though it’s not over-the-top like I’ve seen from some other gaming brands. It has a soft-touch glass on the back, with a small icon that lights up on the back. I expected that this would be usable as a notification LED (makes sense, right?) but that’s not the case. It doesn’t do a whole lot, though there are some settings in the software that you can modify to make it react to things like phone calls.
It’s a pretty thick phone, but it’s still comfortable to hold thanks to the rounded back edges. The camera doesn’t take up a huge amount of space either, nor does it protrude much, even though it packs a pretty large 108MP sensor. The display is also completely flat, with a single-centered punch-hole selfie camera.
The shoulder triggers on the Black Shark 5 Pro are pretty cool
Where this phone is unique in its design is the implementation of two trigger buttons on the right-hand side. They’re not always active, and you need to swipe a release mechanism to allow them out to be pressed. When they’re not released, they are flush with the rest of the chassis of the phone.
Those shoulder triggers have to be mapped to touch inputs to be used in games, as games won’t recognize them as an official controller input. Nevertheless, they’re pretty cool, and it’s not too big of a deal to map them to your favorite games. It takes a bit of setup, but I’ve noticed in games like COD Mobile that it does make a difference, as in my case, I no longer need to claw my hands over the display to aim and shoot effectively. When not gaming, they can also be assigned other functions — for example, they will also take photos in the camera app by default.
For a gamer phone, the Black Shark 5 Pro doesn’t have a lot of unique gamer design, and that’s not really a bad thing. Companies like RedMagic have been known to go a bit overboard in that department, whereas the Black Shark 5 Pro can go unnoticed as just a normal smartphone.
For the display, the Black Shark 5 Pro packs a 1080p flat AMOLED screen that goes up to 144Hz. At first glance, it sounds like a bad thing that it’s full HD 1080p and not 1440p, but there’s a reason for that. Higher resolutions require more computational power, so gaming phones often pack 1080p displays to push as high of a frame rate as possible.
The speakers are really loud and sound very good
There are two speakers, both a top and bottom-firing one. The top speaker I’ve noticed sounds a little tinnier, even though it’s a separate speaker to the earpiece. I’m not sure why that is as I would have expected them to be the same, given that they’re located in the same place on each side and separate from the earpiece. Nevertheless, the speakers are really loud and sound very good, so it’s not a big complaint that I have anyway. There’s no headphone jack either, which is a little strange for a gaming phone.
Black Shark 5 Pro: Gaming experience
Good performance
No thermal throttling makes for a very hot phone
Should have waited for the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1
The “latest and greatest” chipset is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and that’s thanks to all of the problems that consumers have been facing with it. It runs quite hot, drains a lot of battery, and doesn’t offer a huge amount by way of performance improvements over the Snapdragon 888. The Black Shark 5 Pro makes the most of it though and does the best that it can, sometimes to its own detriment.
We ran a gamut of tests on the Black Shark 5 Pro, and while the results were impressive, they were also alarming. CPU Throttling Test raised the temperature of the device to dangerous levels, with heat dissipating through the shoulder triggers at much higher rates than the rest of the phone. The shoulder triggers began to hurt my fingers from the heat. CPU Throttling Test is an unrealistic CPU load to be put on a smartphone, but I ran into similar heating issues when playing The Simpsons: Hit & Run through AetherSX2.
The Black Shark 5 Pro packs top specifications though, and it gives the results to match. We also ran Geekbench 5 and 3DMark’s Wild Life test, and those results lined up with what we expected too. The phone heats up a lot, but that’s par for the course: both with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and with this being a gaming phone. We’d place more of the responsibility for that on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 than on Black Shark, although Black Shark did choose performance over throttling despite the heat.
Playing The Simpsons: Hit & Run was a pleasant experience, and the game runs near flawlessly. I played with a 2x internal resolution, and the game ran at more or less 60 FPS at all times. The phone heated up a lot, but the reduced thermal throttling was noticeable here as the game continued to run well despite the phone feeling like it was going to burn my fingers off. We measured the game’s performance with GameBench, and the results were as good as you’d expect.
To be honest, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been a smarter choice to dial up the thermal throttling just a little bit. An 83% thermal throttle is impressive, but it’s clear that the trade-offs are nigh-on dangerous. You can’t game on this phone intensively for a long time because it starts to hurt. Those temperatures probably aren’t safe for the phone’s battery, either.
This is one of the most powerful phones that I've tested with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
This is a powerful smartphone (and one of the most powerful that I’ve tested with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1), but that’s only because it takes risks. With Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 devices around the corner, it’s a shame that Black Shark didn’t wait it out. From our testing, it’s already a much more efficient chipset, and I think that gaming phones will stand to benefit a lot from it.
The best part of the Black Shark 5 Pro when it comes to power and battery life is the fact that it supports bypass charging. Bypass charging means that your phone will run off of the charger, not using any battery, and not charging up your phone either. It generates less heat (something that is sorely needed with this phone, to be fair), and in theory, safeguards your battery as a result.
We would like to give special thanks to the team at GameBench for the tool they provided us. Their tool makes it possible for any person, whether it be a regular user, journalist, or engineer, to test a mobile game’s performance on an Android device.
Black Shark 5 Pro: Camera
Look, nobody is buying a gaming phone for its camera. If you want a phone that takes good photos and has all of the over-the-top gaming features you may have heard of, there’s practically nothing on the market. Having said that, the Black Shark 5 Pro’s camera gets the job done as a decently usable smartphone camera that you can use in a pinch. Though if you care about picture quality that much, it’s not beating any top camera phones by any stretch of the imagination.
For context, the Black Shark 5 Pro has a single 108MP primary camera, a 13MP ultra-wide camera, and a 5MP telephoto macro lens. That telephoto lens allows for actually useable macro shots, which is a plus over the 2MP macro cameras that manufacturers still to this day throw into phones.
Black Shark 5 Pro: JoyUI
The Black Shark 5 Pro runs JoyUI, the company’s own modification of MIUI. It looks the same and performs the same, with the same launcher, multi-tasking menu, and even the same control center when pulling down from the top right-hand side. It’s basically just a rebrand of MIUI with some green accents and a couple of hardware-specific features. That’s not a bad thing because I like MIUI, but it’s not a huge deviation from it whatsoever.
With JoyUI, you get all of the features that you’ve come to expect from MIUI. You get a fancy always-on display (with a ton of customization options), you get second space, and you get the quick ball if you’re into that. JoyUI is pretty heavy-handed in changes when compared to other Android variants, but to some, that’s a large part of its charm.
There are features here that integrate with the shoulder triggers though, and do it a whole lot better than I expected them to. For example, popping out a shoulder trigger and pressing it when the camera is open will take a photo, and you can enable them to do other things throughout the system, too. They’re not just for gaming, which I appreciated as I was worried that this was essentially just a gaming phone with no thought to the cohesiveness around the rest of the device.
I'm impressed by the level of thought that's been put into making the shoulder triggers a valuable part of the user interface
Overall, it’s more of Xiaomi’s MIUI, with some additional features. I’m impressed by the level of thought that’s been put into making the shoulder triggers a valuable part of the user interface, though, rather than making them an afterthought.
Miscellaneous
Security
To unlock your smartphone, the Black Shark 5 Pro supports both face unlock and a capacitive fingerprint sensor that’s inside of the power button. It’s almost certainly a bit of a cost-saving measure that there isn’t one in the display, but it’s no big deal really. It works well.
Audio
I know I already mentioned how good the speakers are, but it’s worth another moment to get across just how good they are. They’re loud — really loud — and are great for gaming. Black Shark did a great job here. I do need to point out the lack of a headphone jack though, as it’s an essential feature in a gaming phone. Bluetooth audio has latency, and it’s noticeable when gaming.
Battery life and charging
We touched on this already in the gaming experience section, but battery life really isn’t good. Bypass charging helps in the gaming area when you need to keep your phone powered, but the battery life you get out of the box isn’t great. Expect to get, maximum, five hours of screen on time, and it’s very likely you’ll get a lot less — especially when gaming. 120W charging is amazing when you need it and can charge this phone from 0% to 100% in 15 minutes, but it’s not always worth having super fast charging and then having terrible battery life. I’d personally rather have slower charging and a longer battery, especially because there are massively diminishing returns between 65W charging and 120W charging.
Bootloader unlocking, kernel sources, and software updates
You can unlock the bootloader of a Black Shark phone using Xiaomi’s MIUI unlock tool. It’s a bit of an involved process, though.
As for kernel sources, Black Shark basically never releases them. If you want to use custom ROMs or anything like that on your smartphone, this probably isn’t the phone to get. Software updates are also a bit hit or miss in that regard.
Should you buy the Black Shark 5 Pro?
The Black Shark 5 Pro offers a lot of good, but there are a lot of reasons to look elsewhere, too. The kernel source and update situation is particularly alarming, as companies are obligated under the GPL to release timely kernel sources. Some companies, such as OnePlus, have published kernel sources late but still typically always get to them at some point. Black Shark, however, just hasn’t released any kernel sources from the Black Shark 2 or newer.
Even aside from that, the phone itself heats up incredibly when gaming, to the point that I worry it can cause harm and injury. Between that, the lack of a headphone jack, and the battery life concerns, there’s just not a lot that Black Shark gets right for a gaming phone. The shoulder triggers are cool and work well, but that’s the only genuinely unique feature about this phone that you can’t really get anything like anywhere else.
As a result, if what you want is a gaming phone, it’s probably worth waiting to see what’s around the corner — particularly anything that may be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. There are too many trade-offs here, and for €799, there’s probably much better on offer. I love the speakers, I love the shoulder triggers, but I’m really not a fan of anything else with this phone.
The Black Shark 5 Pro is the latest gaming phone from the Xiaomi-backed company, but there are a lot of problems with it that may not necessarily command the price tag.
Black Shark is a gaming smartphone brand that’s been around for a while. It’s backed by Xiaomi (not owned by, as the company fervently reminds the tech community) and typically packs high-end hardware in a more affordable package. Now the Black Shark 5 Pro is here, and it’s more of the same with physical triggers that can be mapped to touch inputs to help your game.
If you’re looking for a powerful smartphone that looks decent, then the Black Shark 5 Pro might well be up your alley. However, it might also be worth waiting for what’s to come after the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 before taking the plunge on a gaming smartphone, as the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 promises to fix a lot of the shortcomings of the preceding flagship chipset.
With the Black Shark 5 Pro, there are a lot of problems that you mightn’t be able to get over, and that includes poor battery life, intense heat, and the lack of a headphone jack. If you’re interested to learn more, then read on.
The Black Shark 5 Pro is the latest gaming phone from the Xiaomi-backed company, but there are a lot of problems with it that may not necessarily command the price tag.
About this review: Black Shark sent us the Black Shark 5 Pro for review. The company did not have any input into the contents of this review.
Black Shark 5 Pro: Design
Not an overly “gamer” look
Camera barely protrudes
Comfortable to hold
The Black Shark 5 Pro’s design can simply be described as “gamer” — though it’s not over-the-top like I’ve seen from some other gaming brands. It has a soft-touch glass on the back, with a small icon that lights up on the back. I expected that this would be usable as a notification LED (makes sense, right?) but that’s not the case. It doesn’t do a whole lot, though there are some settings in the software that you can modify to make it react to things like phone calls.
It’s a pretty thick phone, but it’s still comfortable to hold thanks to the rounded back edges. The camera doesn’t take up a huge amount of space either, nor does it protrude much, even though it packs a pretty large 108MP sensor. The display is also completely flat, with a single-centered punch-hole selfie camera.
The shoulder triggers on the Black Shark 5 Pro are pretty cool
Where this phone is unique in its design is the implementation of two trigger buttons on the right-hand side. They’re not always active, and you need to swipe a release mechanism to allow them out to be pressed. When they’re not released, they are flush with the rest of the chassis of the phone.
Those shoulder triggers have to be mapped to touch inputs to be used in games, as games won’t recognize them as an official controller input. Nevertheless, they’re pretty cool, and it’s not too big of a deal to map them to your favorite games. It takes a bit of setup, but I’ve noticed in games like COD Mobile that it does make a difference, as in my case, I no longer need to claw my hands over the display to aim and shoot effectively. When not gaming, they can also be assigned other functions — for example, they will also take photos in the camera app by default.
For a gamer phone, the Black Shark 5 Pro doesn’t have a lot of unique gamer design, and that’s not really a bad thing. Companies like RedMagic have been known to go a bit overboard in that department, whereas the Black Shark 5 Pro can go unnoticed as just a normal smartphone.
For the display, the Black Shark 5 Pro packs a 1080p flat AMOLED screen that goes up to 144Hz. At first glance, it sounds like a bad thing that it’s full HD 1080p and not 1440p, but there’s a reason for that. Higher resolutions require more computational power, so gaming phones often pack 1080p displays to push as high of a frame rate as possible.
The speakers are really loud and sound very good
There are two speakers, both a top and bottom-firing one. The top speaker I’ve noticed sounds a little tinnier, even though it’s a separate speaker to the earpiece. I’m not sure why that is as I would have expected them to be the same, given that they’re located in the same place on each side and separate from the earpiece. Nevertheless, the speakers are really loud and sound very good, so it’s not a big complaint that I have anyway. There’s no headphone jack either, which is a little strange for a gaming phone.
Black Shark 5 Pro: Gaming experience
Good performance
No thermal throttling makes for a very hot phone
Should have waited for the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1
The “latest and greatest” chipset is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and that’s thanks to all of the problems that consumers have been facing with it. It runs quite hot, drains a lot of battery, and doesn’t offer a huge amount by way of performance improvements over the Snapdragon 888. The Black Shark 5 Pro makes the most of it though and does the best that it can, sometimes to its own detriment.
We ran a gamut of tests on the Black Shark 5 Pro, and while the results were impressive, they were also alarming. CPU Throttling Test raised the temperature of the device to dangerous levels, with heat dissipating through the shoulder triggers at much higher rates than the rest of the phone. The shoulder triggers began to hurt my fingers from the heat. CPU Throttling Test is an unrealistic CPU load to be put on a smartphone, but I ran into similar heating issues when playing The Simpsons: Hit & Run through AetherSX2.
The Black Shark 5 Pro packs top specifications though, and it gives the results to match. We also ran Geekbench 5 and 3DMark’s Wild Life test, and those results lined up with what we expected too. The phone heats up a lot, but that’s par for the course: both with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, and with this being a gaming phone. We’d place more of the responsibility for that on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 than on Black Shark, although Black Shark did choose performance over throttling despite the heat.
Playing The Simpsons: Hit & Run was a pleasant experience, and the game runs near flawlessly. I played with a 2x internal resolution, and the game ran at more or less 60 FPS at all times. The phone heated up a lot, but the reduced thermal throttling was noticeable here as the game continued to run well despite the phone feeling like it was going to burn my fingers off. We measured the game’s performance with GameBench, and the results were as good as you’d expect.
To be honest, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been a smarter choice to dial up the thermal throttling just a little bit. An 83% thermal throttle is impressive, but it’s clear that the trade-offs are nigh-on dangerous. You can’t game on this phone intensively for a long time because it starts to hurt. Those temperatures probably aren’t safe for the phone’s battery, either.
This is one of the most powerful phones that I've tested with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
This is a powerful smartphone (and one of the most powerful that I’ve tested with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1), but that’s only because it takes risks. With Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 devices around the corner, it’s a shame that Black Shark didn’t wait it out. From our testing, it’s already a much more efficient chipset, and I think that gaming phones will stand to benefit a lot from it.
The best part of the Black Shark 5 Pro when it comes to power and battery life is the fact that it supports bypass charging. Bypass charging means that your phone will run off of the charger, not using any battery, and not charging up your phone either. It generates less heat (something that is sorely needed with this phone, to be fair), and in theory, safeguards your battery as a result.
We would like to give special thanks to the team at GameBench for the tool they provided us. Their tool makes it possible for any person, whether it be a regular user, journalist, or engineer, to test a mobile game’s performance on an Android device.
Black Shark 5 Pro: Camera
Look, nobody is buying a gaming phone for its camera. If you want a phone that takes good photos and has all of the over-the-top gaming features you may have heard of, there’s practically nothing on the market. Having said that, the Black Shark 5 Pro’s camera gets the job done as a decently usable smartphone camera that you can use in a pinch. Though if you care about picture quality that much, it’s not beating any top camera phones by any stretch of the imagination.
For context, the Black Shark 5 Pro has a single 108MP primary camera, a 13MP ultra-wide camera, and a 5MP telephoto macro lens. That telephoto lens allows for actually useable macro shots, which is a plus over the 2MP macro cameras that manufacturers still to this day throw into phones.
Black Shark 5 Pro: JoyUI
The Black Shark 5 Pro runs JoyUI, the company’s own modification of MIUI. It looks the same and performs the same, with the same launcher, multi-tasking menu, and even the same control center when pulling down from the top right-hand side. It’s basically just a rebrand of MIUI with some green accents and a couple of hardware-specific features. That’s not a bad thing because I like MIUI, but it’s not a huge deviation from it whatsoever.
With JoyUI, you get all of the features that you’ve come to expect from MIUI. You get a fancy always-on display (with a ton of customization options), you get second space, and you get the quick ball if you’re into that. JoyUI is pretty heavy-handed in changes when compared to other Android variants, but to some, that’s a large part of its charm.
There are features here that integrate with the shoulder triggers though, and do it a whole lot better than I expected them to. For example, popping out a shoulder trigger and pressing it when the camera is open will take a photo, and you can enable them to do other things throughout the system, too. They’re not just for gaming, which I appreciated as I was worried that this was essentially just a gaming phone with no thought to the cohesiveness around the rest of the device.
I'm impressed by the level of thought that's been put into making the shoulder triggers a valuable part of the user interface
Overall, it’s more of Xiaomi’s MIUI, with some additional features. I’m impressed by the level of thought that’s been put into making the shoulder triggers a valuable part of the user interface, though, rather than making them an afterthought.
Miscellaneous
Security
To unlock your smartphone, the Black Shark 5 Pro supports both face unlock and a capacitive fingerprint sensor that’s inside of the power button. It’s almost certainly a bit of a cost-saving measure that there isn’t one in the display, but it’s no big deal really. It works well.
Audio
I know I already mentioned how good the speakers are, but it’s worth another moment to get across just how good they are. They’re loud — really loud — and are great for gaming. Black Shark did a great job here. I do need to point out the lack of a headphone jack though, as it’s an essential feature in a gaming phone. Bluetooth audio has latency, and it’s noticeable when gaming.
Battery life and charging
We touched on this already in the gaming experience section, but battery life really isn’t good. Bypass charging helps in the gaming area when you need to keep your phone powered, but the battery life you get out of the box isn’t great. Expect to get, maximum, five hours of screen on time, and it’s very likely you’ll get a lot less — especially when gaming. 120W charging is amazing when you need it and can charge this phone from 0% to 100% in 15 minutes, but it’s not always worth having super fast charging and then having terrible battery life. I’d personally rather have slower charging and a longer battery, especially because there are massively diminishing returns between 65W charging and 120W charging.
Bootloader unlocking, kernel sources, and software updates
You can unlock the bootloader of a Black Shark phone using Xiaomi’s MIUI unlock tool. It’s a bit of an involved process, though.
As for kernel sources, Black Shark basically never releases them. If you want to use custom ROMs or anything like that on your smartphone, this probably isn’t the phone to get. Software updates are also a bit hit or miss in that regard.
Should you buy the Black Shark 5 Pro?
The Black Shark 5 Pro offers a lot of good, but there are a lot of reasons to look elsewhere, too. The kernel source and update situation is particularly alarming, as companies are obligated under the GPL to release timely kernel sources. Some companies, such as OnePlus, have published kernel sources late but still typically always get to them at some point. Black Shark, however, just hasn’t released any kernel sources from the Black Shark 2 or newer.
Even aside from that, the phone itself heats up incredibly when gaming, to the point that I worry it can cause harm and injury. Between that, the lack of a headphone jack, and the battery life concerns, there’s just not a lot that Black Shark gets right for a gaming phone. The shoulder triggers are cool and work well, but that’s the only genuinely unique feature about this phone that you can’t really get anything like anywhere else.
As a result, if what you want is a gaming phone, it’s probably worth waiting to see what’s around the corner — particularly anything that may be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. There are too many trade-offs here, and for €799, there’s probably much better on offer. I love the speakers, I love the shoulder triggers, but I’m really not a fan of anything else with this phone.
The Black Shark 5 Pro is the latest gaming phone from the Xiaomi-backed company, but there are a lot of problems with it that may not necessarily command the price tag.
Discord has evolved a lot over the years and it now stands as a reliable platform for not only gamers but for anyone looking to connect with their peers over messages, video chat, and more. Many even use it as an alternative to WhatsApp and other popular messaging applications, especially thanks to its great emphasis on groups and communities. Discord has millions of daily active users and a good chunk of those use a bot on a day-to-day basis to automate things. If you use Discord in any capacity then there’s a good chance you’ve used a bot. If you’re wondering how to create one yourself then you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll tell you how to make a Discord bot:
Creating a Discord bot is a relatively simple task. You do need a little bit of programming knowledge to set things up, but the complexity of the code depends on the kind of bot you’re trying to make. Let’s take a look at a few things you need to get started. First, you need a Discord account, which you probably have. If not, you can create one for free by heading over to the Discord homepage. You can also download the Discord client and use it on your gaming laptop or even a phone.
Once done, you need to set up your own server to use the bot. You can then invite the bot to your server easily by following a few simple steps. Once the bot has arrived on your server, you can then code a function for it and use it in your server or assign it to other servers to which you have admin rights. To assign a bot function, we’ll use Node.js to access the discord.js Node library. You can download the latest version of Node.js from the official website.
Additionally, we’ll also need a code editor to write and modify the bot functions. We’ll be using Visual Studio Code in this tutorial, although you’re free to use whichever you like.
How to create and add a Discord bot to your server
The first step is to create an application on Discord for your bot to work. The idea here is to generate a token for your bot so that Discord recognizes the code. For this, you’ll need to head over to Discord’s applications page. You’ll be sent directly to the page once you log in with your Discord account where you’ll see a list of your apps. Don’t worry if the list is empty because we’ll be creating one now.
Hit the New Application button to get started.
Now, give a name to your application and hit Create.
It’ll now take you to a page in which you can enter details such as your app’s description, add tags, an app icon, and more. Once done, hit the Save Changes button to proceed.
Now, look for the Bot option in the menu list on the left sidebar. Tap on it to open the Bots page and press the Add Bot button. Allow permission to create the bot when prompted.
You’ll now see a security token for your bot on the next page. If the token hasn’t been generated, simply tap on the Reset button to create a new token. Copy this token ID as we’ll need it in the following sections.
This particular token allows you to control the bot, meaning you shouldn’t share this with anyone. If you think this token has been compromised, then simply come back to this page and hit the reset button to create a new one.
Now, look for the OAuth2 option in the menu on the left sidebar and click on it to find your CLIENT ID. It’s a long string of numbers that you need to copy and paste to this URL below — replace the word CLIENTID with the actual CLIENT ID that you just copied – https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?&client_id=CLIENTID&scope=bot&permissions=8
Simply paste this particular URL into your web browser and hit enter. It’ll open a page in which you can tell Discord where to send your bot. Select the server to which you want to add your new bot from the dropdown menu like so –
Click on Continue and confirm whether or not you want to grant Admin rights of the server to your bot. You can grant or revoke the admin rights later too, so don’t sweat over this option.
Once you add the bot to your server, you’ll see a message confirming the arrival of the bot. That’s how you’ll know it worked. You’ll also see the bot in the members’ column on the right side.
Well, that’s it, you’ve now created a Discord bot for your server. If you followed all the steps carefully, you should be able to see the bot on your server. The bot will stay offline until you define a function for it with a code, and sync it with the Discord platform. This is where the real work begins as you’ll set up a few parameters and tell your bot what you want it to do.
How to assign bot function and host a Discord bot
Now, follow the steps below to create and host a discord bot on your PC:
For this tutorial, we’ll be creating a simple ‘Ping-Pong’ Discord bot which, as the name suggests, will reply with ‘Pong’ every time you type ‘Ping’.
Create a new folder anywhere on your PC or Mac. We created a ‘New Folder’ on the Desktop in our Windows PC for this tutorial.
Now, open Visual Studio Code and create a new file with the code mentioned below. Replace “Paste your bot’s token here without quotes” with the bot’s token you copied earlier.
DISCORD_TOKEN= “Paste your bot’s token here without quotes.”
Next, create a new file and add the following code. Once done, save this particular file as bot.js within the same folder. This code will add the function to your Discord bot. It’ll reply with “pong” every time you type “ping”.
require(‘dotenv’).config();
const Discord = require(“discord.js”);
const client = new Discord.Client({intents: [“GUILDS”, “GUILD_MESSAGES”]});
client.on(“ready”, () => {
console.log(`Logged in as ${client.user.tag}!`) })
client.on(“message”, msg => {
if (msg.content === “ping”) {
msg.reply(“pong”);
}
})
client.login(process.env.DISCORD_TOKEN);
Now, open the terminal window from the New Folder that you created and install the Discord.js library using the following command. You’ll need Node.js installed on your system for this to work, so keep that in mind.
npm install –save discord.js dotenv
The next step is to create a package.json file. Use the following command to create it:
npm init -y
Lastly, you can now use the “node bot.js” command to run the bot.
As soon as you run the node bot.js command, you’ll notice that the Discord bot in your server will be online. You can then test the bot by typing ‘ping’ to which it will respond ‘pong’.
You can also create a Discord and host it in the cloud for others to use. For that, you’ll have to use an online IDE such as Replit to host your code.
The complexity of the coding process depends on the function you want to assign to your bot. The coding process for a simple ‘Greeting Bot’, for instance, isn’t going to be as complicated as, say, a ‘Music Bot’ that can play music from your preferred platform. You can also create a bot to moderate your server and even kick members that repeatedly break rules in your server. There are tons of useful Discord bots out there, so the possibilities are endless, really. Top.gg is a good place to look for Discord bots if you don’t want to go through the hassle of coding. Just pick up a bot from the website and make changes as necessary to modify the bot according to your needs. There are plenty of options to choose from so be sure to use the search bar on the top to find what you’re looking for.
Well, that brings us to the end of this particular tutorial. There are a ton of useful Discord bots out there right now, so we highly recommend doing a Google search to see if somebody’s already created a bot to automate your process. And before you leave, we also suggest you join XDA’s Discord server in which you’ll find like-minded individuals and also stay up-to-date with all things XDA. So which Discord bot are you going to create first? Let us know by dropping a line in the comments below.
