ECLIPSE is a charging station from Native Union. This product started as a Kickstarter Project back in October 2016 and I was one of its backers. Just like most other Kickstarter project, ECLIPSE was delivered few months late from its initial promise, but at least it delivers reasonably good product.

The basic idea of ECLIPSE is that most other charging station will cause our cables to appear untidy. ECLIPSE tries to change that by building a product with built-in cable organiser. When not in use, the cable will be neatly rolled inside ECLIPSE unit. When in use, we can pull out the cable as long as we need, or as short as necessary.

There are 5 colours available for ECLIPSE: Marine + Cherry Wood, Taupe + Walnut Wood, White + Cherry Wood (Kickstarter special), Gold Aluminum + White Marble and Black Aluminum
+ Black Marble. The last 2 options (models with marbles) are more expensive than the standard ones. I got myself White + Cherry Wood model. Since I got this product from Kickstarter, I also received free power cable strap made of genuine leather and free charging cable.

I like the look and feel of ECLIPSE. It is well made and noticeably solid. Double-tapping the wood surface will trigger a niche mechanism to pop up the cable roll and allow us to attach our cables. There are 3 USB ports available. They are 3 normal full-sized USB plus 1 USB-C port. However, the USB-C port is located side by side with one of the “normal” USB port with sliding cover between them, meaning only one port can be used at any given time. So we end up with 3 ports instead of 4.

Took me a while to figure out the cable rolling mechanism. Since there are 3 ports, there are 3 lanes in the cable roll. One for each cable. There are dedicated “route” for each cable from the port to the rolling lane.

There’s a subtle LED at the bottom. It is on by default when we first plugged in ECLIPSE to power, and it will also turn on automatically after we pop up the cable roll. Single tap on the wood surface toggles the LED. As a bonus, the wood surface is a good place for us to put wireless charger base.

Overall, this is not a bad product. It works as expected and the build quality is nice. One little downside is its size. Thanks to its size, the choices of places where I can put it becomes significantly limited. Admittedly it’s partially my fault for not realising how big it is from the technical specifications. I end up still using it, just not in the spot I initially planned for.