Sony Starts Shipping Its Best Selfie Smartphone, The Xperia C4
Today, Sony announced that this week it will ship its best selfie smartphone yet, the Xperia C4.
The Xperia C4 brings a 5MP front-facing camera that has a 25 mm wide-angle lens optimized for capturing selfies (bigger background area is captured in the photo when the device is held at normal hand length), which eliminates the need for a "selfie stick."
The selfie-camera also brings some other features normally found in high-end rear smartphone cameras, such as a soft-LED flash, HDR, Superior Auto mode, and even the image stabilization SteadyShot feature.
The rear camera brings all of the same software features along with a 13MP resolution sensor and auto-focus.
"Xperia C4 caters to consumers who want a smartphone that not only takes great photos, but also packs a punch. Benefiting from Sony's camera expertise, the 5MP front-facing camera with wide-angle lens lets you capture perfect selfies, while its quality display and performance features provide an all-around advanced smartphone experience," said Tony McNulty, who is in charge of Sony's "value range."
Besides the higher-quality cameras, the Xperia C4 also brings some other impressive specifications for a mid-range device. The smartphone comes with a Mediatek MT6752 SoC, which has an octa-core 1.7 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU, a Mali-T760 GPU (two shader cores) and supports h.265 video playback.
The device comes with a 5.5-inch Full HD display, which seems will soon be the norm for mid-range devices now that higher-end ones are starting to use the 1440p displays. The Xperia C4 has a rather higher screen-to-body ratio of almost 72 percent, which is something we'd only see on higher-end models until recently.
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The smartphone has 2 GB of RAM, which is also likely to become the new standard for mid-range smartphones before long, as higher-end mobile devices start to use 4 GB of RAM.
The 16 GB storage is also not too bad for a mid-range device, especially when it also supports microSD expansion for up to 128 GB. Hopefully, the device will be updated to Android M, because then it would be possible to "adopt" that storage as internal storage as well, which would greatly expand how many apps you can store on the device. However, it's good to keep in mind that microSDs are usually significantly slower than internal storage. For most apps that shouldn't cause a problem, especially if you get a higher-quality microSD card.
The phone has a 2,600 mAh battery that's rated at 13h of talk time, 8h of video playback and 53h of music listening. It will arrive with Android 5.0 out of the box along with Sony's own customizations.
The Xperia C4 is arriving this week in Asia and will start shipping in other regions in the coming weeks. Specific pricing will depend on the carrier.
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Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software news and the issues surrounding privacy and security.
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PaulBags Selfie phones should find a way to protest their users from themselves, stupid people end up doing things like shooting themselves in the face or walking backwards off a cliff just to take a selfie.Reply -
truerock Wide angle lenses take very, very bad photos. Wide angle lenses especially take horrible photos if the subject is close the lens. Only a complete moron would put a wide angle lens in a camera (except for specialty distorted photos for some artistic reason).Reply -
weilin To all those commenting on the wide angle, it's possible/probable that the photo will be processed by software/firmware before being saved as a jpg removing the distortion. Your nose won't take up half the frame.Reply
It wouldn't surprise me if most front cameras on phones are wide angle-ish (30-35mm), you have to be able to capture the whole face + shoulders + a bit of the background all within one arm's length distance. Every manufacturer may be depending on software to make things the right perspective to some degree. -
Ning3n ...because that's what matters most in a smartphone. The "selfie" ability.Reply
IMO, the worst part is that none of these companies that make mobile devices actually give a flying fox fart about DURABILITY. They care more about profits, features and shareholders, anymore. Than they do for product longevity.