Sharp Actius MM10, Recommendations?

I would get a notebook with a better screen size, at 10.4 inch even with a very nice screen it will be small for the eyes. I would look into a 12.1 with XGA which however will bump the weight to about 2.5 to 3 pounds. And plus they are using a 1 GHz Transmeta CrusoeTM TM5800 processor which is not even close to what a low 1.3ghz Centrino can bring in terms of speed. You can easily find ultraportables with 3+ hours of battery life on a standard battery and with an extended battery they usually add another 4 to 6 hours. If I was getting a ultraportable I would go with a Dell 300M or a Toshiba R100. You might even want to look at the new Asus notebook which uses the ultralowpower 1ghz Centrino.

Here is a full review on the notebook:
http://reviews.cnet.com/Sharp_Actius...?tag=pdtl-list

Sharp notebooks

I can't comment on synchronization but I can talk about Sharp notebooks.

I bought a Sharp Actius A200 like.. uh.. 4 years ago? It's been so long that I can't even remember when but I think it was 2000 or late 1999. At the time it was one of the thinnest lightest etc out there with a whopping PII 266 processor (I was happy as hell... it replaced my Texas Instruments P75... hahaha)

Technical Problems and Issues: NONE (w/ 1 caveat. See Legal Problems.)

Legal Problems: There was a class-action lawsuit brought against Sharp by all Actius buyers because of misadvertised battery claims (they just did NOT last after relatively few charges.) I am forgiving of battery issues in mobile electronics (I bought a Sega Game Gear - 'nuff said.)

The Sharp is still chugging along next to me right now. Only now it's missing the Down cursor key, has a splatter stain on the right side of the LCD (INSIDE the panel so it can't be cleaned... still works like a charm though,) and I custom painted it with midnight blue automotive paint...
It's a warrior and Sharp's LCDs are amazing. Side-by-side with my Philips-sourced LCD, it's no contest -- Sharp is just... well... sharper...

Hope my little story helped in some way

I at one point in time owned a Tablet PC. It was a Compaq TC 1000 with a Crusoe (like the one in the Actius).

This tablet PC was slow, despite the fact that I had maxed out the ram at 768 and had a 16mb dedicated gpu. If you are not planning on doing anything besides word processing, emails, or internet... then the notebook will be fine. But even then, when opening a word document that was pretty big the notebook would take a while to open it.

The reason that 256 mb ram isnt enough for the notebook, like it would be in any other notebook, is because of the Transmeta processor. The Crusoe, tries to mimic a Pentium 4 and in doing so it has to get code which would be meant for a P4 and then translate it. This of course takes up a lot of ram, so that in essence, the ram is shared. As you might know WinXP is supposed to take up about 128mb of ram, then you have the Cruose running in the background doing its processes... , you wont be left with much, since the Actius can not be upgraded beyond the 256mb.

In regards to what Jason Chan said about the screen being too small for the eyes, hah. The tablet PC that I owned was running a 10 inch screen at 1024x768 and it was perfect for me. In fact, I was not bothered by the screen at all that I for some time, used the tablet as my primary PC. Besides my own personal account, then you have all of the people who own Sony TR1/2/3s, and owners of the Fujitsu P5000, both notebooks run a 10 inch wide screen at 1280x768! I havent seen any of them complaining about their screen. So i really dont know where Jason Chang got that from... I mean when you want an ultra portable such as the Actius (2.1 lbs!!!) you know you have to give up some things. You cant have a monster screen in a ultra portable.

Now to your comments about the synching of files. I hope you do know that the only thing the Sharp does is it acts as a external harddrive. It is not like a PDA where when you connect it to a cradle it automaticaly updates your appointments, contacts, calendar, emails, etc. Nope, not like that. The only thing closest to that, that the actius can actualy do is synch the files within a folder. So if you have the same folder names in the two PCs, the actius will automaticaly make a copy of one in the other PC. I hope i said this clearly (but i doubt it ).

I hope all of this helped and like I said earlier... if you plan on doing anything else besides the simple tasks of websurfing, email, and word processing, this notebook probably isnt for you.

Well here are my thoughts on this, as for the processor, many reviews have said that the CPU is pretty slow if you are doing internet surfing, reading e-mail, etc. it should be fine, but for heavy duty tasks then look elsewhere. I have read also that SHARP LCD's are one of the best as one of the other forum member has said. If you decide to buy another laptop, there may be some LAPTOP TO PC SYNCONIZATION software out there, here is just one that I found doing a Google Search:

http://www.itsth.de/en/produkte/easy2sync.php


Hope this helps, good luck and God Bless.