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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...