The Sharp Actius MM10 is an ultra-light notebook which has had "Crusoe Inside" for some time already. Launched in Japan originally under the name "Mebius", the North American version is called "Actius" and the only real difference between the two comes in the form of more Megahertz.

The newly announced Sharp Actius MM10 packs a faster punch with help of the 1.0 GHz Crusoe TM5800 processor under the hood. The Sharp Actius is a single spindle ultra-light notebook which weighs 2.1lbs, and comes with a unique docking station that allows you to sync selected files and folders with another desktop system.

The MM10 has little in the way of ports, but still manages to integrate built-in IEEE 802.11b wireless technology alongside 100Base-TX LAN Ethernet connectivity. Alongside the 1GHz Crusoe processor and 10.4" XGA LCD screen there is 256MB of DDR memory (not expandable unfortunately), a 15 GB hard drive, two USB 2.0 ports, a PCMCIA port, and external CD-R/RW & DVD-ROM.

The Sharp Actius itself is skinned in a magnesium and aluminum alloy, and measures a scant 13.7mm thick at its slimmest point; 19.6mm at its thickest. For comparisons sake, a standard No. 2 pencil is just 8mm in diameter. This is a very thin notebook, but in our brief testing of it during Comdex we still found it easy to handle and work with. The touch pad is a nice change from those little dot's in the middle of the keyboard (you're either a dot man, or a touch pad as they say) and the keyboard is nice to type on.

Since the Actius MM10 is so ridiculously thin, the engineers must have some physical limitations with regard to the number, and type, of ports they could build into the unit. Obviously this is a legacy free notebook, but at least there are two USB ports, VGA by dongle, PCMCIA, LAN, and a full assortment of audio jacks. Battery life sits at 2.5 hours, and 7.5 hours using the extended life size for this $1499 notebook.

By itself a portable notebook such as this is going to be somewhat limited by its lack of optical drive. One of the things that make the Fujitsu PC Lifebook P2000 so damn useful are that aside from its long battery life, it has a DVD-CDRW built in. The versatility of this optical drive in a notebook as small as P2000 cannot be understated, so were it not for the cradle docking station, the Sharp Actius would be somewhat counterproductive.

The cradle doesn't have a built in CDROM, but it allows you to snyc up the entire computer to another desktop system - somewhat like PDA. In order maintain data consistency between the MM10 and a desktop, or potentially multiple computers, Sharp have made use of Iomega's SharpSync software.

SharpSync allows the Actius MM10 to seamlessly maintain data consistency between separate computers by giving users the control of selecting folders or files on their separate machines that they would like to keep in sync. When stored in the cradle for charging, the SharpSync utility automatically synchronizes the selected folders between the Actius MM10 and a main computer.

Full Spec Sheet for the Sharp Actius MM10: