While the practice of taking self portraits have been around for yonks, it’s usually a haphazard process on your smartphone that involves using the piddly front cam or awkwardly guesstimating with the rear cam to disastrous effect, which is where the novel Xperia C3 literally comes into the picture.
Designed to take superior selfies, the C3 comes with a 5-MP front camera but also bolts on a 25mm wide angle lens and a soft LED flash to boot. The former helps to address the problem of not being able to fit enough people into the frame and the latter to deal with less than pleasing lighting conditions rather than the harshness of a conventional flash. It also comes with several modes including a self explanatory Beauty Retouch mode to fix er…improve mug shots and a Smile Shutter that snags a shot when you crack a grin.
The rest of the C3’s hardware is midrange fare, with a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor running Android 4.4 Kit Kat paired with 1GB RAM and 8GB of built-in storage supplemented by a microSD card slot. What elevates the C3 from the midrangers out there is the inclusion of NFC and LTE connectivity along with a large 5.5-inch 720P display.
When put through its paces, the C3 proved reasonably smooth, running most apps and games without any noticeable lag barring all the but most intensive apps and games. The display did well, serving up good colours and great viewing angles with the large size making movie watching a pleasant diversion. Shots and 1080P videos captured on the rear 8-MP camera are decent if unexceptional though the front selfie camera served up good portraits and ‘groufies’. Battery life was excellent too lasting a full day’s worth and a bit more if you kick in their built-in Stamina mode. All said, the C3 does does what it says on the tin, delivering a great selfie cam and otherwise decent all-around performance.
