Tiny Notebook Doubles as Hard Drive

A slim build, a modest weight, and an attractive price make Sharp's Actius MM10 notebook a real head turner. But its ability to moonlight as a second hard drive for your desktop PC makes it unique.

At just over a half-inch thick and a scant 2.1 pounds, the $1499 MM10 is one of the thinnest and lightest notebooks I've tested. My preproduction unit came stocked with modest but acceptable basics like Transmeta's 1-GHz Crusoe chip, 256MB of RAM, a 15GB hard drive, a 10.4-inch display, and built-in Wi-Fi wireless connectivity.

Tiny Issues

And that's about it. The problem with a notebook this size is that some of the features you'd find on a larger laptop are missing here. For example, the unit lacks a full complement of ports, offering just two USB connections, a VGA-out (with dongle), an ethernet port, and a single Type II PC Card slot.

Other size-related problems include a cramped keyboard that made touch typing difficult. And poor placement of several keys--for example, the Page Up key is where the left Shift key normally resides--didn't help matters.

The battery life wasn't stellar, either. The notebook's small-size battery netted a relatively meager 2 hours during my informal tests.

These problems aside, the MM10 is a decent notebook, and its distinctive Hard Disk Dock unit intrigued me. The upright stand acts as the notebook's battery charger, and it also lets you connect the notebook to your desktop PC as a second drive via USB 2.0. I was wowed by the simplicity of the process: You connect the MM10, your desktop sees it, Windows assigns it a letter, and you're done.

The Actius MM10 is an attractive ultraportable with a docking feature that makes it the perfect complement to a standard desktop computer. A better keyboard would have helped the unit's rating, but in the meantime the MM10 is an ingenious product for small-handed persons or for masters of the classic hunt-and-peck method of typing.

SUMMARY

Sharp Actius MM10 Elegant notebook doubles as a desktop hard drive, but it could use a better keyboard. List: $1499