Once in a while a great phone comes along that despite being worthy of success doesn’t take off due to bad marketing and support. The Mitsubishi Trium Eclipse suffered such a fate at the hands of the Japanese company. Launched in late 2001, with a slew of features, this phone combined amazing tools at a similarly amazing price. Having found its way to India through the grey market, I had the opportunity to lay my hands on this gem of a piece.
36-24-36 (The body)
===========
The most striking thing about this phone is its vibrant colour screen, 256 colours displayed by all of a 143X120 pixel screen. That translates into a 10 line text display, along with the 11th line showing menu functions. The keypad is fluorescent green backlit with standard soft rubber keys including a 4 way round cursor and 2 programmable soft keys for quick access to your favourite functions.
The battery is Lithium-Ion 900mAh which pleased me to no end as despite having such a big colour screen the phone lasts me 4-5 days from full charge, after I broke into the battery.
The figure (in spirit of the sub-heading above) of the phone is very curvaceous, giving it a banana like look. The phone grips well though some people might find it on the larger side at 138X24X28 mm, yet still the phone is feather light at 110gms (which is lighter than a 3310). The only sore point for me is its very obnoxious antenna. But with such a big screen and clear reception it gives you no reason to grumble. You win some, you lose some.
Giving Microsoft a complex (Software)
===========================
This is where the phone beats its competitors left, right and centre. Its immense phone book stores 255 vcards, with each vcard storing 4 numbers (home, office, fax and mobile) along with address, email and a picture icon. To add to the party there is a voice dialing function which records upto 20 names, not to mention the one key calling function from 2-9 (1 is for voice mail). Another common but useful function is its Group features, i.e. you can assign numbers to a particular group (out of the 15 allowed) and can assign different ringtones to different groups.
Along with the phone book, this phone has the best calendar, diary cum tasks scheduler I have encountered to date. You can give a Title, description, starting date, due date and even set an alarm for a particular event. Now no way are you gonna forget that ‘date’ with the hot chick.
The SMS functions include T9 predictive text input, Multicasting SMS sending (sending one SMS to several persons at a time) and storage of 10 predefined SMS templates.
Ringtones are mono as well as polyphonic and extra ones can be downloaded from the net (Mitsubishi site offers free Ringtones, wallpapers and banners for downloading). You can download upto 40 (gawk! You read that right ‘40’) extra Ringtones besides the good 30 built in. Best of all its Nokia compatible, i.e. your nokia friends with a ringtone composer can send you tones through SMS.
There are 2 very nice games involving the popular Rayman character, ‘Rayman Garden’ and ‘Rayman Bowling’. While garden is a memory game, bowling is the cooler one involving different scenarios while the colour screen along with polyphonic sound effects brings the game to life.
While the world shrinks through the net, this phone is not getting left behind either. While WAP failed to catch on as much as its proponents were prophesizing, it still has a sizeable presence. This phone comes with WAP 1.2.1 and a browser to view WAP sites in colour. GPRS class 8 is offered and all this is enabled with a built in 14.4kbps Data/fax modem.
Thoda aaur chalega (Extras)
===================
I first gave a double flip when I saw it, but this phone allows you to record a voice memo upto 2 minutes. Whaddya know, your own Dictaphone to record that precious sound byte. You can even use it to record your phone conversations. Integrated Handsfree with a speakerphone is expected and available.
Another feature that had my friends gunning to handle this phone is its 5 animated menu themes. One called ‘Urban’ shows day from 07:00 in the morning to 19:00 hours and promptly shows evening (moon, stars et al) from 19:00 to 07:00. ‘Woody’ is a jungle setting with number of trees substituting for the network signal and battery strength bars. ‘Daisy’ is on similar lines with the number of petals on a flower giving the signal strength and, a beetle on a stalk for battery. ‘Lindberg’ gives you the option of showing times from two cities (mine is at Mumbai and New York) simultaneously on the standby screen, purrfect for travelers and ‘Trium’ is Mitsubishi’s own theme with a fluttering butterfly. Also, the phone gives more scope for personalizing by allowing you to put your own banners and wallpapers (I have Arnie from Terminator, available at yahoo).
On the left side of the phone is a scroll bar which besides helping you to browse through the menu, also allows quick access to call alert types (ring, silent, vibrate, vibrate and ring, vibrate then ring). The vibrator is pretty strong and has more than once given me a shock when I keep it in my jeans front pocket during lectures.
Remember the Eveready ad ‘gimme red’, well literally, just when you thought how much more could the phone offer, you can’t help but notice the Infra red port on its right hand side which you can use to transfer messages, vcards and calendar events to another IrDA enabled device.
One more thing that I instantly took to is its Auto-Off and Auto-On feature. I have set it to automatically switch off at midnight and automatically switch on at 06:00 in the morning. Another amazing way to save battery.
Other standard stuff included is the Notepad, Calculator, Currency converter and the Alarm setting (with customization of a polyphonic tone).
Aur kuch kehna baki hai?
=================
I first spotted this phone on baazee.com when its bid was at 2000rs. I bid for it thinking that I wouldn’t bid for it more than 3500. Everyday I kept getting outbid and everyday I put in a fresh one, simultaneously scouring the net for its reviews and any info that I could get on it. After reading all the possible reviews which were one sidedly favourable I got so smitten by it that I set my heart on buying the phone and one week later finally put in the winning bit at 4600 bucks, inclusive of one year dealer warranty, hands free, computer data cable and delivery charges.
While till now I have been waxing eloquent about it, only thing going against it could be that the polyphonic ringtones (not the monophonic ones) are hard to distinguish in loud and noisy spaces (silence zone for cell phones anyone?) and with the plethora of features learning to operate the menu might take a while. Still, for me it’s been one month with this phone now and I couldn’t be happier. Everyone who sees it can’t help but comment on its humongous colour screen and once I give them a run through its features, no one leaves unimpressed, especially after I tell them the price. This is one phone no one is gonna forget in a hurry!
==============================================
Official website of the phone is:
https://mitsubishi-telecom.com/products_detail.asp?id=5970
The review is pretty long cause I wanted to do a comprehensive one. You are reading this means you survived through it. Please do be liberal with your comments, even scathing ones.
