Sharp unveils thinnest notebook yet

by Martyn Williams

(IDG) -- Sharp Electronics has taken the wraps off a notebook that the company claims is the thinnest and lightest yet, less than an inch thick and weighing less than three pounds.

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The machine has the unwieldy name of PC-MT1-H1. It has a 12.1-inch screen, but is .7 inches in height at its thinnest point and weighs 2.9 pounds, according to Sharp. It is scheduled to ship in Japan starting June 30 priced at $1667. Sharp plans to sell the notebook outside Japan, although a spokesperson says precise launch plans are not yet decided.

Sharp's new notebook is based on a 500-MHz Intel Mobile Pentium III processor and includes 128MB of main memory, a 20GB hard disk drive and Fast Ethernet port. It has a single slot each for PC Card and Compact Flash cards, and two USB ports. The 12.1-inch TFT LCD is capable of maximum XGA resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels and 16.8 million colors.

Plug-In Drives Conserve Space

To keep the size down, Sharp keeps the floppy and CD-ROM drives outside the notebook and supplies them as external units. The company says battery life is 3.3 hours on the standard power pack, with up to ten hours available on an extended battery.

This is Sharp's second new thin-and-light notebook in a week. Its Mebius PC-SX1-H1, also shipping first in Japan in June, uses a Transmeta Crusoe processor, and Sharp claims it will run for as long as ten hours with a second battery.

The Sharp PC-MT1-H1 measures up well against other leading notebooks with 12.1-inch screens. Sony's Vaio R505 is .92 inches thick and weighs 3.74 pounds. IBM's ThinkPad i-1620 machine is 1.2 inches thick and weighs 3.5 pounds, and NEC's LaVie M-series notebooks are 1.14 inches thick and weigh 3.5 pounds.