Sharp PC-A280 > Reviews (2)

The PC-A280 features a footprint smaller that a piece of A4, and is about an inch high, definately amongst the ultra portables, and very useful for those that are constantly on the move.
I purchased this machine 2 years ago for the rather inflated £2000+ price tag over a similar spec'd sony, mainly out of distrust of sony's propriety hard ware, i'e jog dials, memory sticks and the likes. In the past two years this machine has served me well, the performance of the Pentium II 366 is obviously showing it's age now. I work as a freelance 2D/3D artist, my work has allways been done on a dedicated workstation, but i purchased this laptop so i could present models and walkthroughs to clients, it seemed more proffesional to me at the time rather than only handing out printouts of work.
The Trident Cyber Graphics card is nothing to write home about, with only 2Mb of video memory it can only handle basic direct 3d, so software such as 3D studio is best run in HEIDI mode. The graphics card also supports dual displays and runs at a more than reasonable rate when handling two 800x600 32 bit colour displays
The other use of this machine has been for office, and emails, the keyboard is adequate for most day to day tasks, my concern with it has allways been the directional keys that are located in an L shape at the bottom right hand corner, somewhat irritating, but only an issue if you are attempting to run games on it.
The PC-A280, is very versitile when it comes to working with other computers, A 10/100 NIC is built in as well as an IRDA port supporting SHARP ASK IR, and a 56K internal modem, laplink proffesional is also bundled with the systems software to make this task easier, although i have this laptops drive connected as a network drive.
The laptop comes with an external flopy drive, which also includes the external ports for printer, and keyboard, the bad thing is the CD-ROM drive is an optional extra some i'm using a PCMICA drive of an old sony vaio.
Overall the machine is well designed, apart from the keyboard, it's looks are amazing, definately something to parade around the office, the one thing you should keep in mind when purchasing one is you need to buy a cd-rom drive which can add an additional £250 to the price tag, the battery also leaves something to be desired, but if portablity is key there are few machines i have used that rival it.