Sharp’s NetWalker PC-Z1 Netbook

Sharp displayed their extremely small Netwalker PC-Z1 netbook at CEATEC Japan this year. It is nothing like the smallest of small netbooks that you have seen so far and it is more like an MID with a keyboard or a so-called UMPC.

That said, its 5inch screen and tiny keypad has a way of making you interested in using what seems like a perfect miniature. Since this is Sharp you are dealing with, the aesthetics are pretty good and the 5inch screen works quite well. Also, it does not have a touchpad and make do with its touchscreen and a built-in ‘optical mouse’ instead. The main idea here is to surf the web and edit a few documents. So you are not expected to need anything else.

Performance wise it would not match up to a ‘full-sized’ netbook with an Atom processor because it uses an ARM 800MHz processor. So it is more like the iPhone than an Eee PC.

This is a very noticeable thing when it comes to smaller devices that are almost handhelds but not quite there yet. They almost always go for ARM processors and that’s because ARM is the only company that can give them good power efficiency without completely decimating all hopes of processing power.

Much as Intel might try, it is indeed very hard to compete with someone like ARM in a segment that the latter dominates. Intel would love to pretend that Atom is a great choice for small devices such as the Netwalker but that is quite far from the reality at the moment.