Product Reviews

Mobile phones have come a long way quickly to become powerful and flexible office tools. The integration of Bluetooth and PDA functionality has taken this a step further, but there's still one area that's dated - the screen. Trium's Eclipse aims to remedy this, combining the usual spread of phone features with a 120 x 143 pixel 256-colour screen. But do you really need it?

The first thing that strikes you about the Trium Eclipse is how light it feels, despite weighing 110g. In part, this is due to its slightly bulbous but hollow-feeling case, giving a less than professional feel. However, turn the Eclipse on and it soon becomes apparent that it's not a toy - it features a bright 256-colour display, showing a cityscape with skyscrapers, the current time and network logo. Plus, legends for the left- and right-hand rocker buttons are labelled Internet and SMS. This is clearly a phone designed for digital as much as voice communication.

A major advantage of the high-resolution screen is the excellent SMS display. Rather than the dull mono screens of typical devices, the Eclipse's default display can show the sender's details plus the text in full colour. This large screen also meant that the WAP browsing experience was quite enjoyable and, once a connection was established, we could see 11 lines of text on screen at one time - a huge improvement to the usability of WAP.

The keypad buttons are all fairly small, which means that fingernail, rather than fingertip, operation is required. This is especially true for the left- and right-hand rocker switches, where the two ends of a button can have totally opposite results, only one of which has a legend. For example, to divert an incoming call to voicemail, you touch the right-hand rocker at the bottom. But press it at the top or too near the middle and you can activate the speakerphone, blaring your call out to everyone in the meeting room.

The central four-way touchpad can be used to navigate the excellent menu system. During menu navigation, the display shows the current menu selection plus the two options before and the two after in the cycle. Consequently it's easy to know where you are.

There are endless customisations possible on the phone. The Eclipse has five ring tones as standard, but

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additional tones can be downloaded to the phone, and there are also two games, which benefit immensely from the colour screen. In addition to this there are five graphical themes, which are most visible on the home screen. The Urban theme shows different images during the day and night, with cars with headlights moving along the road, and the Lindbergh theme displays two time zones.

Setting up the second time zone illustrates some of the trivial but irritating shortcomings of the phone. It's possible to specify the second time zone and to quickly swap between the two zones with a single keystroke. However, defining the time offset of the second time zone proved impossible if the city was anything other than a few hours ahead of GMT. There seemed to be no documented method of entering New York with five hours' negative time difference, and the phone wouldn't accept 19 hours ahead. Other aspects of the user interface are even more annoying. When entering text, some punctuation marks are accessed using the '1' key and others using the '#' key with no logical organisation. Additionally, the power adaptor and headset are terminated with similar connectors and, as neither makes a confident connection to the phone (and the sockets aren't labelled), it can be frustrating and time consuming to use.

The Eclipse is GPRS capable but hasn't yet been approved by any of the networks so it wasn't possible to test this facility. In fact, it's not even certain whether GPRS will be activated when Trium launches the Eclipse and it's possible that early models will need to be returned to the manufacturer to have the GPRS facility turned on.

In terms of standard phone features though, the Eclipse is reasonably well stocked, with calendar and to-do functions, plus voice memo and voice dialling. There's also vCard and vCalendar support and a fax/data modem. An IrDA port is included too, but this doesn't provide the facility for computer connectivity, so backing up the phone address book and calendar or synchronising it with a PDA, notebook or desktop isn't possible. This is something that should realistically be expected of all new phones these days.

Overall, the phone gives the impression of a unit with its heart in the right place but this is marred by a number of weaknesses. Aside from the user interface problems, the robustness of the case must be questioned. The removable back plate that exposes the battery and SIM slot wouldn't feel out of place on a cheap plastic toy, and the whole case doesn't give you confidence that it would survive many drops.

Trium would do well to make modifications to the case, redesign some aspects of the user interface and add some PC connectivity, perhaps including Bluetooth. At that point, it will have a surefire winner, especially with such a superb display. But as yet, the Trium Eclipse isn't quite there.