WHAT'S HOT: The Actius MM10 is one extremely thin and lightweight notebook. It measures less than an inch thick with the screen closed and weighs just 2.1 pounds without its peripherals. An optional external USB 8X DVD-ROM and 24X/10X/24X CD-RW combo drive is available, as are an external floppy drive, an external CD-ROM drive, and a high-capacity battery pack. 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless and 10/100 ethernet networking are built in.

But the MM10's hottest feature is its docking cradle that effectively turns the notebook into an external USB hard drive. You dock the notebook by standing it vertically, left edge down, in the cradle's sleeve; an included USB cable connects the cradle to your PC. When you flip a switch on the cradle's front to "on," the notebook's 15GB hard drive pops up as a drive letter in an Explorer window on the host. You can then swap files and folders between the notebook's hard drive and the host PC's hard drive as quickly and easily as moving around files and folders on the same machine. The notebook also charges while it's docked.

WHAT'S NOT: The little Actius MM10 suffers from the usual woes of ultraportables, and then some. For one thing, it's far from "blazingly fast" (as described on Sharp's Web site). Transmeta Crusoe processors, designed for thin ultraportables, may run cool, but they tend to perform poorly, and the MM10's 1-GHz TM5800 chip was no different. In our tests, the MM10 posted a dawdling PC WorldBench 4 score of just 50--less than half the speed of the average Intel-powered notebook we've tested recently. The MM10 should still be fine for running a few mainstream applications at once, but it's not the best candidate for CPU-intensive work. It is not even powerful enough to make full use of the external combo drive: A DVD movie we played looked awful, with interrupted audio and choppy video on the small dim screen. Don't count on upgrading memory or storage--both RAM and the small 15GB hard drive are fixed.

It's a good thing the MM10's backspace key is so large and easy to hit--you'll be using it a lot. The keyboard is small and shallow, and some important keys are half size. We could not reliably touch-type the question-mark/slash key, for instance, without hitting the right Shift key instead.

Finally, those who are less than eagle-eyed will have to crank up the size of the icons on the MM10's 10.4-inch screen to make them readable. The screen's native resolution is 1024-by-768 pixels, which makes icons and labels microscopic at their default size. An 800-by-600 setting is also available, but it shrinks the desktop to the center of the screen and surrounds it with a black border. You can stretch the picture back out to fill the screen, but that makes the display look fuzzy.

WHAT ELSE: The MM10's screen does perform one neat trick: when you lay it flat and type Ctrl-Shift-F4, it flips the image, making it right side up to someone sitting behind the notebook. This could come in handy during an informal presentation, especially once you get the hang of moving the cursor in the direction you want it to go (in the opposite direction that you move your hand).

The MM10 has a USB 2.0 port on either side of the case, one PC Card slot, an ethernet port, and a headphone jack. But everything else is adapted to accommodate its thin design. It has neither a standard DB-15 video connector, nor a built-in modem. Instead, a short VGA dongle plugs into a proprietary connection on the back of the notebook, and the MM10 uses a PC Card-based modem (included as standard equipment). Sharp also does not provide an optional docking station to add missing features such as a FireWire port, stereo sound, or more USB ports. The minimalist design does keep weight down: The notebook and its peripherals--the combo drive, modem card, and two power adapters (one for the notebook and one for the optical drive)--weigh altogether just over 4 pounds. (The cradle weighs 1.7 pounds, but you'll typically leave that at your desk.)

Though the MM10's mouse buttons are small and stiff, they get the job done, and the touchpad's cursor is nicely responsive. The thin lithium ion battery performed fairly well in our tests, lasting 2.7 hours, almost as long as the 2.9 hours the vendor advertises. For day-long, on-the-go computing, which this 2-pound notebook is meant for, you'll have to buy Sharp's high-capacity battery, which lasts 9 hours (according to the vendor) but adds $199 to the price and half a pound to the weight. Productivity applications also cost extra. The MM10's small manual is nothing fancy, but it covers all the notebook's features.

UPSHOT: If you are willing to work within its limitations, the MM10 merits attention. It weighs so little, you may forget you're carrying it, and it should be fine for basic work and wireless communications. The offbeat icing on the cake is its included docking cradle, which lets you easily sync files and keep duplicates on both the MM10 and your desktop.

SUMMARY

Sharp Actius MM10 PC WorldBench 4 score of 50, 1-GHz TransMeta Crusoe TM5800, 256MB of DDR SDRAM, Windows XP Home, 10.4-inch XGA screen, 8MB of graphics memory, 15GB hard drive, USB 8X DVD-ROM and 24X/10X/24X CD-RW combo drive, built-in 10/100 ethernet and 802.11b wireless networking, touchpad pointing device, 4.5-pound weight (including external optical drive, power adapters for notebook and drive, phone cord, USB cord, modem card). One-year parts and labor warranty; lifetime 24-hour daily toll-free technical support. $1499 800/237-4277 www.sharpsystems.com