When I received this new phone for review, for a while I kept on wondering what company it is! The box just said ?Honor?. Similarly, the rear section of the phone was branded as ?Honor?. I went to ?Settings? and nowhere was it apparent what brand it is until I reached the ?Legal information? section that talked about Huawei Privacy Policy. Oh, so much for finding a brand name!
The Huawei Honor 3C is amongst the newest smartphones to hit the Indian market. Huawei claims the Honor 3C has been ?specially designed to fulfil all the aspirations that you can have from a smartphone.? It further adds that, to make it possible, every feature of the phone has been enhanced?bigger screen, a better processor, a better camera and a stronger battery. Sure, the Honor 3C starts to impress you once you unlock it and the screen comes to life. But how is the overall impression? Let?s find out.
First, the build quality. The Honor 3C, sure, is not in the league of, say, the Huawei Ascend G6 as far as build quality is concerned, yet it doesn?t really disappoint. (Okay, it is a bit too glossy and that means it will have fingerprints all over its body minutes after you start using it.) But the five-inch HD LCD screen of the Honor 3C gives you dynamic and rich colours so that you can enjoy lifelike images and videos. The screen is highly responsive and its reflection levels are just right. The phone has this unique rounded edge design that makes it comfortable to hold and experience. Further, its screen-to-body ratio is quite good?the upper bezel of 4.5 mm reduces down to 2.2 mm on the sides of the screen and that to the compactness of the phone.
The Huawei Honor 3C comes with a 1.3 GHz QuadCore processor. No issues with this. In fact, although this is not among the best processors in the market, it works well in combination with the 2GB RAM. So, be it playing online games, downloading or watching streaming videos, or sending mails? the phone handles most tasks decently.
Now, let?s talk about the camera. The Honor 3C comes with an 8-megapixel Sony BSI camera. Huawei says the camera boasts of a Blue Glass Filter that gives you the luxury of choosing the desired hue for your photos. The camera clicks good and clear photos and the videos it shoots are also of HD quality. Well, nowadays, an 8-megapixel camera is getting common in most smartphones. So what is special about this camera? It is the Voice Photograph function, which enables you to click photographs by voice command. Nice. The front camera, too, is innovative. As you activate it, it tells you where to look on the screen (in a preview window that pops up) so that your expression is properly captured. At 5-megapixel, the front camera shoots great selfies and, as we found out, makes the video calling experience quite good. This camera also has a 22-mm wide angle lens.
The Honor 3C is powered by the Android 4.2 OS. Then there is this additional benefit of the EmotionUI 2.0 system (developed by Huawei) that makes phone management simple. For example, it starts your selected applications automatically when you turn the phone on. Besides, your applications also get better security through features such as harassment filter, permission manager and notification manager. It also gets motion control feature so that you can flip it to mute, shake to rearrange, double touch to turn on the screen and slide to turn on the screen and open specified apps.
Powered by a 2300 mAh battery, the Honor 3C also gets the Huawei patented power saving technology that uses the power 30% more efficiently than any other phone. This means that you can play more games, watch more videos and talk longer on a single charge. Although we couldn?t use 3G for a long period of time on the Honor 3C, we believe the battery life is among its strongest points.
At Rs 14,999, the Honor 3C is in a segment where it has to face a lot of competition. Agreed, it is not the best looker of the lot, but it certainly is among the better performers.
Estimated street price: Rs 14,999
