Sharp WideNote M4000 Review

This review has been eclipsed. Yesterday the organizers of January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas announced the selection of Sharp's WideNote M4000 notebook for display in the Technology Is a Girl's Best Friend Diamond Product Showcase, where it will flaunt its elegant design alongside a purse-styled laptop bag and Motorola's magenta Razr phone. Anything we say will be an anticlimax after that.

Still, we're glad to report on Sharp's new slimline -- and think many male as well as female travelers will be glad to see it. As its name implies, the WideNote boasts a wide-aspect-ratio screen -- a 13.3-inch-diagonal display with better-than-average brightness and contrast.

That, in turn, dictates a case wide enough to accommodate a better-than-average, desktop-sized keyboard. Next, Sharp polishes its image with a handsome brushed-aluminum case, which combines with the silver-finish keyboard to make a laptop that's a pleasure to look at (and resists fingerprints and smudges, unlike the chrome mouse buttons beneath the keypad).

Finally, the M4000 strikes a better-than-average balance of weight and size: With both an 80GB hard disk and DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive built in (i.e., no external drives or docking station necessary), the Sharp comes in at a trim 3.7 pounds, with its AC adapter adding 11 ounces. When you consider how many portables pare down to the 4-pound level by specifying a shrunken keyboard and 10- or 12-inch screen, the Sharp looks well worth a look.

We're not entirely satisfied because we think it's rapidly becoming a must to have a DVD±RW recorder instead of just a CD-RW, but maybe Sharp and the CES people think women don't burn DVDs. Either that, or the company made choices to keep the WideNote's price a reasonable $1,800.

Energy Star

Inside its magnesium frame, the M4000 features Intel's Pentium M 740 -- a 1.7GHz processor with 533MHz front-side bus and hefty 2MB of Level 2 cache. Intel's 915GM integrated-graphics chipset and tri-mode Pro/Wireless 2915ABG WiFi adapter complete the Centrino-brand bundle.

You'll also find 512MB of DDR-2/533 memory, expandable to 1GB ($199) or 1.5GB ($459). The 80GB hard disk is a 4,200-rpm Fujitsu unit with a 2MB buffer; the Matsushita optical drive offers 8X DVD-ROM playback and 24/24/24X CD-RW performance.

While the Pentium M is well known for performance-per-watt efficiency, Sharp says it went more than an extra mile to make the WideNote cool, quiet, and long-lasting. For instance, integrating a heat sink without a heat pipe keeps the underside of the notebook from warming your lap as much as many portables do, and we can attest that the cooling fan kicks in only occasionally (such as during our CPU- and graphics-stressing benchmark tests as opposed to routine writing and Web surfing) and even then is unobtrusive.

Sharp is even prouder of a button above the keyboard that cycles the notebook through three sets of power-consumption settings, dubbed Max Power, Mobile, and Max Mobile. These serve the same function as Win XP's Power Options control panel, but go beyond familiar things like powering down the hard disk and LCD backlight -- you can tweak 11 different settings, from four levels of CPU performance to dropping the display's refresh rate or removing your Windows wallpaper. (According to Sharp, replacing your desktop art with a plain white background brings a 1-percent boost in battery life.)

We tried the WideNote with both Sharp's power schemes and our usual preferences in Windows' Portable/Laptop properties. With the latter, a mix of leisurely word processing and disk-intensive software installation and CD listening yielded 3 hours and 40 minutes of battery life. Using Sharp's Max Mobile defaults with a few stretches of Mobile, we managed an even more impressive 4 hours and 35 minutes.

To be sure, that had its discomforts: Though it didn't give us the headache we anticipated, we kept losing sight of the mouse pointer in the dimmed display (5/13ths of maximum brightness, while even Mobile mode's 9/13ths was two or three levels below our liking). And Max Mobile's just-short-of-shutdown idle meant painfully slow -- we're talking 30 seconds -- delays when we did something like activating our word processor's not-yet-loaded-from-disk spell checker. Still, the customizable setting combinations are a nice idea, and the M4000's battery life would earn a thumbs-up even without them.

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