Getting the right features in a lightweight notebook is challenging, to say the least, and an optical drive is often the most noticeable omission. The new, affordable Sharp Actius AV18P ($1,449 direct) is one of the few systems that gives you a featherweight computer with a 12-inch screen and an optical drive.
The AV18P's competitors are few. Best known are the $2,199 Toshiba Portégé M100 and $1,599 Apple PowerBook G4 (12-inch), both with 12-inch displays and integrated optical drives. Sharp beats them on price but is weak on performance and battery life. Our test system, which ran only 2 hours 19 minutes, would likely not have played an entire 2-hour video, given the extra power consumed by constant DVD accesses. To get the 4:47 the Portégé M100 gave, you'd have to add a $200 clip-on battery.
Picture quality is the best part about the AV18P, which, as with most Sharp notebooks, uses the company's proprietary sharp-fx plug-in for WinDVD, enhancing the already good picture when you're watching DVDs. Other than WinDVD (and Windows XP Pro), the only other software is Norton AntiVirus and Sonic's Drag'n Drop CD?.
The silver-and-gray system is a marvel of miniaturization: It measures just 1.1 by 11.1 by 9.4 inches (HWD), weighs 4.1 pounds, and has a road weight (which includes the transformer) of 4.9 pounds. The PowerBook G4 and Portégé M100 are slightly thicker and heavier and the PowerBook G4 is a few tenths of an inch smaller in width and depth. Without a tape measure in hand, you'd perceive the competing units to be about the same size, with the Portégé M100 a tad thicker. In a beauty contest, the AV18P would be first runner-up—it's nicer than the Portégé, but won't draw the oohs and ahs the PowerBook G4 gets.
The AV18P has most of the usual checklist features: a PC Card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port, and a VGA and a TV-out connector, but no printer port. Wired and Wireless Ethernet (802.11b) are standard. Dig deeper and you'll find a mixed bag, which is why this system garners three stars to the Toshiba Portégé M100's four.
The 18-mm key spacing is 95 percent of the normal spread, which feels okay but not great for typing. Performance is similar—okay, but just not up to par. It's satisfactory for word processing and Web surfing, but it's not suitable for gaming, video editing, or other applications that require high performance. The AV18P's low score of 5.4 on the mainstream Business Winstone 2004 test results from the system's modest components: an 1.4-GHz AMD Athlon XP-M 1800 CPU, an S3 ProSavage 8 graphics subsystem embedded in the core chipset, and 256MB (rather than 512MB) of system memory shared with the graphics controller. The low battery life was also likely an effect of the components, given that the Portégé M100's 4:47 run time came from a battery with a 43-watt-hour capacity, just slightly more than the 40 of the AV18P battery.
If price is a concern or if you're dazzled by the quality of DVD playback from the Sharp Actius AV18P and don't need to depend on the battery, then this notebook is a reasonable choice among the handful of 12-inch-display systems with integrated optical drives. But the Portégé M100 is the preferable system in this category.
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