I swear this just happened to me today which is why I was glad to discover the BroadbandFax from Sharp. My real estate agent was supposed to fax me an important document but I was running late. So I told her just to wait and fax it to me when I got to the person's home. Upon my arrival, I discovered they had no fax machine. They had a computer but no fax.

Now I realize you can use a flatbed scanner to scan in a document so that you can email it. But evidently my real estate agent didn't own a flatbed scanner. I guess I'm picking up the document tomorrow. But wouldn't it be nice if a fax machine could not only send faxes but send those documents directly to an email address as an attachment? That's exactly what you can do with the UX-B800SE BroadbandFax from Sharp.

It seems like so many of today's communication electronic devices are acquiring the ability to connect to the Internet. The telephone does and it's called Voice Over Internet Protocol or VOIP. Both voice and video phones are connection and taking advantage of the additional broadband speeds. Several digital camera models can go online such as Kodak's Easy Share line. Television devices like the SlingBox let you see what's being displayed on your TV from anywhere you can get Internet access. So it was inevitable that we'd eventually see a fax machine go online too.

The BroadbandFax is simply a normal progression of the technology much like the others I've just mentioned. The BroadbandFax looks a lot like any other fax machine except that it's front panel has a full-function QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard's main function is for typing in the email address.

You connect the BroadbandFax to your Internet service in much the same way you connect your computer to your Internet connection, as well as connecting it into a standard phone line. That's pretty much it.

Once connected and set up, you can still send ordinary faxes to ordinary fax machines which is why you need the phone connection. But that's where the similarity ends. With the BroadbandFax, you can send the document to any email address. And since the connection is one of high speed, a typical fax can be sent in around six seconds using this ability.

Place the document into the BroadbandFax's paper feeder, enter in the email address and press Send. The BroadbandFax converts the document into either a TIFF or PDF file, attaches it to an email and sends it out. No fuss, no muss. The BroadbandFax includes a 100-page memory and it can store a number of commonly used email address and phone numbers. Any user on the network to which you connect it can also access the numbers, email address and even send faxes to groups from an ordinary web browser.

One really nice feature of the BroadbandFax is that it has two-sided send that lets you fax two-sided documents unattended. The other more common features are here too such as using it as a copier, sorting and zoom.

There's also a built-in phone/fax smart switch that lets you share a single line for a telephone and fax machine.

One other nice touch is a security ability that lets you password-protect a fax via its secure receive feature that requires the user to enter a password in order to actually print it out.

If your business demands require you to receive faxes from your office while you are on the road, there's a good chance that your destination may not have a fax machine, or you may not know their machine's phone number. But there's a good chance you already know your destination's email address and if they have a computer, you can get your faxes. And since the BroadbandFax's price of $159.99 is the same as an ordinary entry-level fax machine, why not have this really flexible ability added to your communications arsenal?