Created: 13 October 2026 · Last edited: 20 October 2026

"Show me you're a display nerd without saying you are." "There you go," says Sharp, "we put an LCD touchpad on our newest laptop." Wow!

The Sharp Mebius PC-NJ70A netbook was announced on 21 April 2009, and it made news all over the world, even beyond specialist computer publications and discussion forums. It has a great 10.1" LCD with a resolution of 1024 × 600 px, capable of reproducing 16.77 million colours – nothing extraordinary here.

But where you'd normally find the touchpad sits a 4-inch optical-sensor LCD with a resolution of 854 × 480 px and LED backlighting, capable of reproducing 65,536 colours. The touchpad isn't simply a tiny secondary monitor. The LCD incorporates optical sensors into the transistor layer, detecting the reflection or shadows of a finger or pen. That lets it work both as a display and as an input device, without a conventional touch-sensor layer or protective film on the surface. Sharp claimed this was a world first for notebook PCs as of 21 April 2009. But I don't know of anyone else who tried anything like this, even later.

The capabilities of the optical-sensor LCD included:

• Conventional pointer and gesture operation
• Multi-finger gestures to zoom and rotate images or web pages
• Handwriting and drawing with a dedicated pen
• Customisable pad backgrounds, menu icons and even the cabinet's rear design
• Special applications for a piano, mini-bowling, matching puzzles, sticky notes, calculators and menus
• E-book reading, including support for the Japanese XMDF format, and dictionary applications

Apparently, the keyboard wasn't bad either: an 86-key Japanese layout, with a 17.5 mm key pitch and 2 mm key travel.

This Mebius netbook, the first one after a year's silence on the portable-computer front, is powered by a category-typical Intel Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.60 GHz. It has 1 GB of RAM (expandable to 2 GB), integrated graphics with up to 256 MB of shared memory, and a 160 GB hard drive.

The PC-NJ70A has HD audio processing and stereo speakers, as well as a mono microphone and a microphone input. It comes packed with software – just about anything you might need on a notebook, and more. It also has a 1.3-megapixel camera planted on the top edge of the display, which you can use for live video conferencing and such.

The body is made of resin and has a glossy finish. Its dimensions are 260 (width) × 190 (depth) × 23.3–39.8 (height) mm, and it weighs about 1.46 kg. The Mebius PC-NJ70A is available in black or white. The estimated retail price in mid-2009 was ¥80,000, roughly equivalent to US$817.

A model named PC-NJ80A was also released, offering the same hardware but with Microsoft Office Personal bundled. While the PC-NJ70A price was around ¥80,000, that of the PC-NJ80A was ¥100,000 (both prices for the 1 GB RAM version).