Huawei Honor 3C review

Battery life

With decidedly average specifications, the Honor 3C doesn't need a huge battery capacity to easily keep it going for full day without charge.

The 2,300mAh battery is the same capacity as the outgoing Nexus 5, but with the lower-resolution screen and considerably lower processor clock speed, it is more than ample.

Running our staple HD video with full brightness and power-saving settings set to 'normal' mode, the battery life dropped to 72% after running the 90 minute video.

That's a 28% drop, which shows that the Honor 3C isn't the most thirsty smartphone around, and could be made to last much longer than a day if you make use of the included power saving options.

The essentials

Though you may not know it when you look at the behaviour of most smartphone users, making calls is still an important function that must be faultless in order for a phone to be successful.

Fortunately, making calls on the Honor 3C were made without fault, though call quality was on the tinny side. The dialer and contacts app is functional, but overall very basic.

The messaging app is another drab and basic affair, although Huawei's default keyboard is accurate and reasonably speedy. Swype is also pre-installed that allows you to draw your way through text messages and other text input.

For web browsing, the Honor 3C includes both Google's Chrome browser, as well as the stock Android browser, that has had some very minor UI adjustment to bring it in line with Huawei's other apps. It includes tabbed browsing, incognito mode, bookmarks that can sync with your Google account and all the other staple features of an Android browser.

Camera

8MP on the rear and 5MP upfront, you may think, are enough to satisfy anyone. Yet when it comes to quality snappers, everyone should know by now that the wool can't be pulled over your eyes entirely by specs. There's plenty of other considerations afoot when assessing a camera's quality.

After all, Apple wouldn't have stuck with the same number of pixels in its iPhone 6 sensor if all that counted was a figure.

For quick snaps, the cameras on the Honor 3C are not anywhere near as terrible as some of the other budget phones I've tried, but they're also far from perfect, particularly as I found that most photos came out with a slight blue/purple tinge.

Focusing and waiting for the camera to take the picture was sometimes a bit of a bore, and even launching into the camera app itself would mean frustrating additional moment of blackness while the camera sensor fired up.

In good light, you'll get some reasonable 'selfies', thanks largely due to the pixel-packed front facing camera. Look a little closer, and it's no surprise to see that the photos are largely noisy and a little smeared.

An LED flash situated alongside the rear sensor improved some night-time photos, and completely washed out others. Also included are a range of camera adjustments, such as HDR, panorama, beauty and an automatic 'smart' mode.

There are also six additional live effects you can implement, but other than perhaps the monochrome option, they're largely useless. If your photos are coming out overly exposed, a 'Meter' mode allows you to choose the area of the photo from which to judge the exposure level.

Overall, I'd describe the camera as 'good enough' for a budget phone such as this, and easily as good as the same resolution camera found in the Motorola Moto G.