Sony Xperia C3 Review – Beauty without brain

Sony Xperia C3 is a case of beauty outside but ugly inside. When you look at it and hold it for the first time, you might think that this phone in no way could cost around 23,000 Rupees(Approx $370). But it does. That’s where the saying “Looks can be deceiving” comes in. This phone is being sold by Sony with a tagline that says “World’s best selfie smartphone” which means it’s for the people that are conscious about their looks, so obviously the phone should look good too. Right? I don’t know you tell me.

Hardware & Build Quality

Sony Xperia C3 is mainly made of solid plastic except for its back which has kind of rubberized texture. It’s very slim and light. It looks and feels like a very premium device. It’s only 7.6mm thick and weighs approximately 150 grams. The back of the phone is not removable. One other thing about the hardware is, you don’t need a pin or anything to access its sim port. It’s hidden under a flap on the right hand side of the phone and inside that flap there’s a sim tray which is pretty easy to take out and it takes two similar size sims. Pretty neat.

You can see what it looks like in practical in the video below. Although, every time you take the sim tray out even when it is empty it will restart the phone. Other notable hardware feature is the dedicated camera button pretty rare in smartphones these days. And a notification led on the top left corner of the phone. It glows in various colours like green while charging and blue when there’s notification of a message.

Display

Xperia C3 comes with a 5.5 inches IPS LCD display coupled with some of Sony’s own technologies like Triluminious LED backlit and Sony Mobile Bravia Engine. The display is very good. Colour reproduction is very soft/warm and viewing angles are great too. The brightness of the screen could’ve been a little more but then again nobody i think ever uses the smartphone with full brightness because of battery concerns.

When the brightness is set to automatic the screen feels pretty dull and dim. So, you might wanna un-tick that automatic option and manually set it yourself. You will see the difference instantly.

Multimedia

Sony Xperia C3’s music and video playback both are great. The music quality in ears is awesome and video playback is good too until you only play video up-to 1080p resolution on it. If you try to play anything above that resolution like a 2K resolution video it will simple refuse to play it. I am talking about the default video player. It would start in MX player but the playback would be very choppy so, there’s no point in even trying. Unless you want to see a slideshow of a movie at very high resolution.

The external speaker could’ve been louder. In a crowded place or a place with lot of ambient noise, you won’t be able to hear the ringtone, it’s that low.

Camera

This is what this phone is about after all. Xperia C3 comes with 8MP rear facing camera which has all your usual features like auto-focus, HDR, full HD recording, LED flash. But that’s not what this phone is about, in this phone it’s all about the front or ‘selfie’ camera. Xperia C3’s front camera is of 5MP with a LED flash making it one between a handful of phones that comes with the said feature.

The quality well that’s subjective and you can decide better by looking at the samples below yourself and there’s also a video sample in the review video below. All i can tell you is that its rear camera’s performance in low light is very poor especially without flash. You can literally see the noise on the phone’s screen. Bright red pixels that glow on the screen when you are shooting in low light condition is noise. Using flash reduces this noise and makes the photo a lot cleaner.

The rear camera’s performance becomes at least decent during day time though. But there’s one more thing the photos comes out of focus very frequently, so you might wanna keep that hand of yours steady. The front ‘selfie’ camera well, it does what it advertise and it alters the photos in such a way that a photo of your face looks more clean than your face actually is and with flash on it could even make you look more ‘flashy’. If you know what i mean.

Below in the gallery there are two photos of my nephew can you guess which is taken from which camera?

Storage/OS

Sony Xperia C3 runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box a customized Sony Xperia UI on top. The UI is very well optimized for the chipset and doesn’t lag. The transitions remains smooth although when sometimes there are lots of apps opened in the background it might stutter for a second but then it stabilizes itself automatically. Xperia C3 comes with 1GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 300MB free and 8GB of internal storage out of which you’ll get around 4GB-5GB free it is expandable up-to 32GB. Xperia C3 does not support preferred install location or default write disk option but it does support move to sd card feature.

Performance

Xperia C3 consists of Snapdragonn 400 chipset which itself is consists of quad-core Cortex A7 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz and Adreno 305GPU. You can’t expect much from this chipset. It can play most of the games available in the app store with a little to no lag and most Gameloft games that are optimized for Adreno 305. The one thing it can not do is give you RAW performance. Which makes this phone not future proof.

The thing is when you have raw power you don’t have to depend on the developers to be able to play a game. You don’t have to wait for them to optimize it for the chipset inside your phone. When you have raw power you can just put the game in your phone and it will run without any issues. But without raw power what would happen is either the game will either not start entirely or even if it manage to start somehow it will lag so horribly that you’ll basically wont be able to play it at all.

Like what happens with Sony Xperia C3 when i tried to run GTA San Andreas on it. The game started without any issues but after that it starts to run like a slideshow basically unplayable. You can expect a 23,000 Rupees phone to be able to run GTA San Andreas but it can’t. For a casual person though that doesn’t care about gaming that much the performance is pretty smooth all around the OS thanks to all the software optimizations done by Sony.

Connectivity/Call Quality

The WiFi of this phone is fast it connects pretty very fast and doesn’t loose signal easily. It’s got a lot of other connectivity options like NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, screen mirroring. It also supports USB OTG. Xperia C3 dual is a as you can tell by the name dual sim device and takes two micro sims. Call quality is very good. Both the ear piece and the mic at the bottom is loud and clear.

Battery

This is where Xperia C3 really shines all thanks to its mediocre chipset. This is one of those cases in which you are getting more than you asked for. It comes with 2500 mAh battery which is more than enough for all day usage and on top of that since it is an Xperia phone it also comes with ‘Power Management’ settings. You can increase your battery life even further through these options but beware some of these modes might make your phone slow because of ultra-low usage of power, like Stamina mode.

These modes mostly saves the battery life by disabling features when not used like turning off WiFi and mobile data when screen is off and sometimes throttling the CPU to the lowest operational frequency possible which might make the phone lag. I would suggest you to not use these battery saving feature because Xperia C3 already comes with more than enough juice. You can use it when trying to really save your battery for a long period of time like during long train journey otherwise no because it could make your phone unnecessarily slow.

Choice/Verdict

My verdict for this phone is a straight no. Let me tell you something, any phone around this price range can take better selfies than this phone maybe it wont have a front LED flash but seriously 23,000 Rupees just for an extra LED flash? If you remove that front camera and flash this phone is nothing different than Xperia T3 or Xperia M2 except for the difference in screen sizes of few inches. This phone is not worth 23,000 Rupees. Name alone does not sell phones anymore, Sony. People want value.

Here comes the fun part. The choice. You make your choices on what you like and what you don’t like. For instance my choice in terms of smartphone depends on its performance then second comes the screen and music quality. I could be careless for its camera quality. So taking that into action i can fairly say that Sony Xperia C3 is not for me. Now, if you are like me that like performance more than anything else than obviously it’s not for you either. See, how simple i made it.

But then again, there are other people in this world that cares about the looks and camera quality of a phone more than anything else. Not everyone is the same. I would kill to have decent chipset inside the same exact hardware. Seriously, its build quality is really very good. Hell, let me give you a million dollar idea for free Sony. Put the Mediatek MTK 6592 chipset(yes, the octa-core one) in the same shell and sell it for below 20,000 Rupees and i can give you a guarantee that it will sell like gangbusters.