Thanks to its flashing lights and parental control options, the Sanyo Katana Eclipse makes a great choice for a teen's or tween's phone. Its voice quality isn't stellar, but young people generally have sharp ears and might overlook that flaw for a flashy multimedia phone with a lot of features targeted toward their age group.

The Eclipse is a midrange flip phone with one shining personalization feature: two stripes of flashing, multicolored lights on either side of the small, dim 1-inch front-panel LCD. The lights are completely customizable, and can be tied to calls from specific contacts—so you can make your mom ring purple, your sister ring red, and your brother ring green, for example—an enticing and unusual personalization trick.

Also on the front of the 3.4-ounce, 3.6-by-1.9-by-0.7-inch handset, you'll see the huge speakerphone—another Katana special—and three music control buttons. Flip the phone open to see a 2-inch, 176-by-220-pixel display (which could be brighter), along with a keypad of well-separated, rectangular keys.

Combine the Eclipse's flashing lights with parental controls and we've got something going here. The phone has a Restrictions menu that you can access with a four-digit password, letting parents turn data services or the camera on or off, block certain phone numbers, lock the phone book or restrict voice calls to existing contacts only. It's not as flexible as AT&T or T-Mobile's network based controls, but it's as good as you'll get on Sprint.

We weren't all that impressed by the Eclipse's voice quality or reception. Reception was average, and voices sounded harsh and compressed, especially compared with the way they sounded on a Motorola RAZR VE20 we were testing at the same time. On the other end, transmissions sounded a bit fuzzy and were marred by wind noise. The speakerphone is refreshingly, delightfully loud, but transmissions sounded a bit thin. We got some pops and clicks through our Motorola S9 and Plantronics Voyager 520 Bluetooth headsets. The Eclipse has loud, clear ringtones and supports mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, as well as 2.5mm wired headsets. Battery life was decent, at 4 hours 45 minutes of talk time, and we triggered the VoiceSignal voice dialing over Bluetooth headsets without a problem.

Teens will appreciate that the Eclipse is a full-featured phone, with all the typical music, photo, and gaming capabilities.

The built-in 1.3-megapixel camera takes washed-out, bluish photos, but they're serviceable, and the camera actually performs pretty well in low light. The video mode takes smooth 176-by-144 videos at 15 frames per second.

You also get an interesting set of Internet features. Pressing the left soft key from the main menu jumps you right to a list of useful Web shortcuts like MySpace and Facebook, and the built-in NetFront 3.4 Web browser does a decent job of displaying mobile-formatted or relatively simple desktop pages. (It doesn't do too well with intense activities like streaming media, though.) The Eclipse also runs Sprint's standard Seven e-mail and OZ IM applications, which the carrier includes at no charge. The e-mail program supports AOL Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, POP3/IMAP, and even Microsoft Exchange e-mail, while the IM program supports AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo! messaging (but not full AOL buddy lists, alas).

Our Eclipse came with a copy of Loopt, the mobile social-networking program popular with prepaid Boost phone users, but it wasn't working yet. It also runs the Opera Mini Web browser well, in addition to Google Maps and Microsoft Live voice/map search. The Eclipse's 91-MHz ARM9 processor isn't the fastest in the world, but the relatively low screen resolution actually works in its favor for gaming—the phone has to push fewer pixels than, say, the Motorola VE20. Games play fine.

We're disappointed in the Eclipse's music and video playback features. For music, the Eclipse forces you to use Sprint's Music Store application, which has a text-oriented interface that makes it very difficult to navigate through more than a few dozen songs. There's no obvious way to play videos stored on your memory card at all, though you can do it if you burrow down to the phone's file manager. Sprint's streaming music and video services work much better, though the streaming services play over only wired headsets, not Bluetooth.

Overall, the Sanyo Katana Eclipse makes a good choice for a younger Sprint user who appreciates the flashy lights, games, and social networking on a phone. More voice-oriented subscribers should probably look toward the better-sounding Motorola VE20 or RAZR2 V9M, while those who want a better Internet experience should try the Web-centric Samsung Instinct.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 45 minutes

Compare the Sanyo Katana Eclipse with several other mobile phones side by side.