Honor 4C review: It is a decent buy in a budget price range

Huawei’s new sub-brand Honor recently made a debut in India with its flagships, Honor 4X and Honor 6 Plus. The two smartphone faired quite well in the Indian smartphone market, and the brand gained a reputation for its efficient products.

In May 2015, Huawei launched another product in the budget segment, the Honor 4C. We have had a chance for a hands-on experience with the Honor 4C, here is what we drew out of the smartphone’s experience.

The Honor 4C’s built quality is a lot similar to the Honor 4X. It is strong and sturdy, and the back panel of the smartphone is made out of a textured hard plastic. The smartphone is comfortable to hold and use, however it may be slightly big for one hand usability (specially for people with small hands).

The Honor 4C sports a 5-inch IPS LCD display. Owing to the glossiness of the display, the front panel easily attracts fingerprints and smudges. A screen protecting guard is highly recommended.

The table below lists the under-the-hood specifications of the smartphone:

The Honor 4C runs on the older version of Android operating system, the v4.4.2 KitKat. The smartphone has a customised user interface called the EMUI, which has a close resemblance to Xiaomi’s MIUI. The 4C’s UI is smooth and fluid, and the transitions are mostly trouble-free, except for when too many files and running at the same time on the smartphone. On the overall performance front, the Honor 4C is quite decent. It is recommended mostly for people who do not do much heavy-duty work on the smartphone.

The display of the smartphone has a great viewing angle, and the display’s legibility in bright sunlight is pretty good too — clear enough to read even in bright sunlight.

Moving on to the camera, the Honor 4C features a 13MP primary camera and a 5MP front-facing camera. Huawei, since its first Honor launch has been touting the smartphones for its high-quality cameras. Honor claims that the image quality of their phones compares or sometime exceeds that of many high-end smartphones in the market.

The camera quality of the Honor 4C is certainly impressive. The pictures clicked by the smartphone are sharp and vibrant. Yet, when zoomed-in, the pictures pixel-ate a bit. It was also noticed that some colors in the images from the 4C are a little too brighter than the natural colors. However, the overall performance of the both the front and rear camera is quite satisfactory.

Below are a few shots taken from the rear camera. You can click to view/download the images and view them at full resolution in order to judge the performance of the camera.

Gathering from the experience with the smartphone, the Honor 4C is a decent buy for the price of Rs 8,999. At its budget price tag, it offers a decent performance, it scores well at aesthetics and ergonomics, and as mentioned earlier, the camera is its highlight. The smartphone is quite user friendly, and is recommended for people whose usage of the smartphone is limited to calling, texting and social media. It is not advised for high-performance and heavy-duty usage.