Sony Xperia C4 Dual Hands-on, First Impressions

Selfies as a primary reason for a smartphone, is something one might not want to purchase it for. But, if everything else is decent enough in it, a good selfie camera certainly becomes a great addition. Sony’s Xperia C3 had a good front-facing camera, and it was marketed with the same reason. But the design was the worst part about it. Uncomfortable to hold, an awkwardly large size and that plastic used made it one of the worst designed phones from Sony. The Xperia C4, yet another selfie smartphone in the lot, is much better with the design. For a 5.5-inch screen which is the same size as its predecessor, the size of the phone now is smaller.

The Xperia C3 was wider, taller but only a little slimmer than the new C4, but there are a lot of specs upgraded in the newer device. Interestingly, Sony has moved on from Qualcomm to Mediatek, and the Xperia C4 is powered by Mediatek MT6752 processor (octa-core 64-bit chipset), along with 2GB of RAM. Looking at every way, the Xperia C4 seems like a perfect phablet competing the mid-range devices from other brands, while the C3 couldn’t do that except for the selfie camera part.

As far as the other specs are concerned, the Xperia C4 has a 1080p resolution display under the 5.5-inch screen, and the camera combination includes a 13-megapixel rear, and 5-megapixel front-facing camera. Both the cameras have an LED flash support. The Xperia C4 runs Android 5.0 Lollipop with the Xperia UI, and a 2600 mAh battery powers the phablet.

It is still the same plastic body, but thankfully the silver colored frame on the sides is removed. Simpler, and neater to look at, the side has quite some inclusions. The right side has a circular power button, volume rocker, camera shutter button and a tall flap that exposes three slots, two for SIM cards and one for a MicroSD card.

The MicroUSB port is still on the left panel, just like on its predecessor. The back has a 13-megapixel camera with LED flash, and a speaker grill towards the bottom left corner. The front-top houses a 5-megapixel wide-angle lens, and a LED flash is placed there as well.

Just to note, two well known smartphones in the market, the Lenovo A7000, and the Gionee Elife S7, are powered by the same processor – Mediatek MT6752, and this is supported by ARM Mali760 MP2 GPU. This is a combination that has been doing well, irrespective of how the interface is.

Though we haven’t played around with the Xperia C4 for a long time, we can vouch for its swift response and good gaming. Xperia UI stays on top of Android Lollipop OS in the device, and that is much similar to the one in M4 Aqua, and both have the Multitasking feature, where few apps can be used at the same time. This makes sense in the large screen of Xperia C4.

About 10GB of internal storage was available after a reset, out of the 16GB ROM. Here’s what is better internally, from its predecessor. Not just the internal storage that bumps from 8GB to 16GB, the RAM included is of 2GB, and the MicroSD card slot supports a card of 128GB capacity.

The camera app comes with quite a lot of possibilities, and selfie lovers can spend a lot of time exploring what all can be done. There are several modes for both the cameras, and it is to an extent where faces can be replaced by interesting characters, and the flash provided can be used with different levels of intensity to brighten the selfies. PROSelfies is what Sony calls it, for the captures from front-facing camera, and these indeed deserve all the appreciation.

The Xperia C4 is going to be available in White, Black, and Mint options. We’ve used only the Black one, and we are quite far from seeing an official launch of this smartphone in India. This is a Dual SIM device, and the LTE availability is dependent on the market, and we cannot confirm about its connectivity in India.