Up until now, poco has enjoyed quite the success in the mainstream smartphone segment but it doesn’t seem like it wants to stop there. This is the poco c3 and this is its first entry-level android smartphone. Now with prices starting at just 9000 rupees. The poco c3 offers a big battery a big display and a gaming-oriented MediaTek soc. However, is this package worth your money, and should you pick this over the competition? Such as the real me c 11 or even the redmi 9a? let’s find out.
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Price
The poco c3 is a pretty large smartphone and it is available in multiple colors. Now the one i have with me here is called lime green. However in my opinion it looks more blue than anything else poco is offering the c3 in two different variants in the country. The base variant has 3 GB of ram and 32gb of storage which is priced at 8500 rupees. Now the top-end variant has 4gb of ram and 64gb of storage and this one is priced at 8999 rupees. Apart from this, you get a 6.53 inch HD plus LCD display up front that comes with panda glass for scratch protection.
Processor
The phone is powered by the mediatek helio g35 soc and you also get a large 5000 milliamp hour battery. Now more on performance and battery life in just a bit. Overall the poco c3 seems like a pretty well built phone for the price. However, it is a little heavy and a little unwieldy for one-handed use. The back and side frame is plastic and you get rounded edges on all sides. The textured pattern on the back panel does help to grip the phone better and also doesn’t pick up fingerprints easily.
Display
Coming to the front the large 6.5 inch HD plus display is nothing to write home about. It’s not very vibrant. The brightness levels are just about adequate and the screen washes out pretty badly under sunlight making it hard to use. If you’re outdoors the viewing experience for videos or even playing games isn’t the best because of this dual display. So don’t expect a lot in terms of software the poco c3 runs on miui 12 which is similar to what you get on redmi smartphones. However, poco claims that they have tweaked the software a bit. To not offer any ads or promotional content during my time with the poco c3. I haven’t yet seen any ads or unsolicited alerts clogging up the notification shade though. I did get the occasional alert from getting apps which is Xiaomi’s own curated app store. This was mostly to alert me about new updates for some of the installed apps. Now other than this, the miui 12 experience felt familiar you still get a bunch of small apps and games pre-installed but you can remove them easily.
Performance
Let’s talk about the performance now I have the 4gb version of the poco c3. So I was expecting a relatively smooth performance but sadly this is not the case. I noticed an inherent lag in pretty much everything from the animations to multitasking. Miui is still very usable but the experience is not as smooth as you’d get on phones with slightly more powerful chipsets away. This is the story of most android phones around the 9000 rupee price point games run decently. Well, but you do need to temper your expectations for instance games call of duty mobile scale. Well on the poco c3 and gameplay is relatively smooth but with vastly reduced graphics. However, titles such as car x drift racing 2 struggle to run at consistent frame rates.
Battery
Now the one area where the poco c3 excels is the battery life. You get a 5000 milliamp-hour battery in this smartphone and in my experience. It easily lasted for about two full days with medium to light usage my only gripe is the long time needed to charge the battery with the bundled adapter. The c3 is the battery charged to just about 37 in an hour and took almost three hours to charge completely.
Camera
It’s time to take a look at the cameras. The poco c3 has a triple rear camera setup which again is not something we see too often in this budget price segment. Now you get a 13-megapixel primary camera coupled with a 2-megapixel depth camera and a 2-megapixel macro camera for selfies. There’s a 5-megapixel front camera the camera app has standard shooting modes auto hdr and ai scene recognition. However, there’s no dedicated low-light shooting mode with that said here are some sample shots that i took daylight shots, in general, are pretty decent with fairly good details and colors.
However, hdr isn’t always handled very well. With the highlights often getting overexposed close-ups to have good detail as long as there’s ample light. But once again the highlights tend to blow out when shooting in the sunlight. The macro camera has a lot of shutter lag due to which most of the pictures usually end up with a slight blur unless you’re extremely still. Portrait mode does a decent job too but there’s no way. To adjust the level of blur while shooting photoshop and low light have weak details and exposure is generally poor unless. There are enough light sources around. This result was expected given the narrow aperture and entry level positioning of the poco c3.
The phone can shoot up to 1080p 30fps video but without stabilization. Once again I found the video quality to be pretty average. Overall finally the selfie camera captures usable shots in the daytime but the quality drops quite a bit in low light.
Conclusion
The base variant of the poco c3 could be a decent pick at seven and a half thousand rupees. If all you want is a basic android smartphone with strong battery life. However, keep in mind that the display is a bit dull. The performance isn’t great and the cameras are just about serviceable. The 4gb version doesn’t seem to offer very good value since at nearly 9000 rupees. You can get better phones such as the real me narzo 20a and even the moto e7 plus and that’s been it for my review of the poco c3.
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