Sony Xperia C3

Out now
8th July 2014

"Selfie" seems to be one of the key buzzwords of 2014, and the Sony Xperia C3 tries to ride this somewhat narcissistic phenomenon with a 5 megapixel front-facing camera and a big 5.5" screen just in case you have long arms.

The front camera has a wide-angle lens with a soft LED flash, 720p video recording plus a whole bunch of software enhancements to allow you to retouch and enhance your self-portrait.. and yes, you can even make yourself look more beautiful than you are. On the other side is a conventional 8 megapixel camera also with an LED flash and 1080p capture.

The display is big but not particularly high resolution, coming in at 5.5" and 720 x 1280 pixels. It should still be a good quality display as it uses Sony's TRILUMINOS technology. This all makes it a fairly large handset at 156 x 79 x 7.6mm and 150 grams, but it is hardly a brick.

Inside the Xperia C3 is rather modestly specified with a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of flash storage plus a microSD slot, a decently-sized 2500 mAh battery. The Xperia C3 supports LTE bands 1, 3, 7, 8 and 28, has NFC and comes with an FM radio plus of course all the usual features such as WiFi, GPS and GLONASS support, Bluetooth 4.0 and everything else that goes into a modern smartphone.

This is a dual-SIM Android 4.4 KitKat device with all the Sony enhancements you would expect, and Sony say that it should start shipping from August onwards (first in China) in Black, White and Mint colour schemes. No guidance was given on price, but we would think that it will be a little more expensive than the upcoming Xperia T3 and will retail for between €300 to €350.