The forgotten smartphone: Honor 3C

January 1, 2023 Luisa Rey

It was one of two phones first released by Honor in the Netherlands; the Honor 3C. Time to dust off this forgotten smartphone and discuss it in our section ‘The forgotten smartphone’. What can we say about Honor with its 3C?

Honor 3C

In this edition of ‘The forgotten smartphone’ we don’t go very far back in time. The Honor brand came in October 2014 with the news that it came to the Netherlands as a daughter brand of Huawei. For this, the brand brought out two devices. That is the Honor 6 discussed earlier in the section, and the Honor 3C. We will discuss the latter in our weekly column this Sunday.

The Honor 3C was presented as an affordable starter with a price tag of 139 euros. But what did you get for that amount at the time? Honor equipped the 3C with a quad-core processor from MediaTek with a computing power of 1.3GHz. There was 2GB of RAM and a storage space of 8GB. You could (fortunately) expand this memory with a memory card. The phone was equipped with a 5.0 inch LCD display with an HD resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. With dimensions of 139.5 x 71.4 x 9.2 millimeters and a weight of only 140 grams, the device was nice and light and quite compact.

Honor delivered the Honor 3C with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, later Android 4.4.2 KitKat was rolled out for the device. The well-known EMUI shell was laid over the Honor’s interface. This was the same as that skin from Huawei, which also placed the EMUI layer on top of Android. Especially in the beginning when Huawei came to the Netherlands, this shell was very similar to Apple’s iOS. For taking photos, the Honor 3C featured a single 8-megapixel camera on the rear and a 5-megapixel camera on the front. The battery capacity was 2300 mAh.

The Honor 3C was well received by the public. At the time, phones in that price range were not yet equipped with 4G. That was therefore not present on the Honor. You could, however, place a second SIM card, but this was only suitable for use on the 2G network. The device was also a real fingerprint magnet and the device felt very plastic.