VIA's trying its hand once again at the "mini-note" form factor, with a new OpenBook reference design. Its first go round, the
NanoBook, was generally panned in light of the ultra-successful
Eee PC, but certainly wasn't ignored. The new design is right in line with the new wave of subnotebooks, with an 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 screen, connection options including WiMAX, HSDPA and EV-DA, three USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, a 4-in-1 card reader and front and back 2 megapixel webcams. There's also room for 2GB of RAM and a 2.5-inch HDD, and you can run Vista, XP or your Linux flavor of choice. It's all based around a new VIA VX800 chipset running that trusty ol' C7-M ULV processor, with some video acceleration tweaks to make multimedia possible. You'll be able to get about 3 hours of juice out of a 4-cell battery. The entire design is being distributed as a CAD file under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license, which means OEMs can take these designs and run with them -- and also means that we'll be seeing plenty of versions without all the trimmings mentioned here. The real test of this new unit might come down to price, and since that's up to manufacturers VIA isn't saying where it'll land just yet, but it'll probably be closer to $600 than the $300-ish price points of the last gen.
posted May 27th 2008 7:14AM
I love the design but the fact that it's using C7 instead of Isaiah makes this worthless. Still, a nice welcome to the Atom me-toos
Very nice looking, Vista looks great too!
Yes the C7 is the problem here...
As much as I love Vista, it's a resource whore and would rape that notebook to death. XP is the optimal choice for a computer of this caliber.
Vista is a software operating system and as such has no physical appendages, sexual or otherwise, for notebook raping. Mmmm.... maybe you're thinking about a ReadyBoost stick, but I'm sure you don't use it that way.
Now don't all your faces look red, as the video of the Openbook running Vista shows it runs it perfectly well.
The MBA was antiquated in all the ways that matter before it came out.
Is it too much to hope for that all these ultranotebooks could use the same eeePC format battery and 12v-3a PSU?
Isaiah (CN) is pin compatible with Esther (C7) so I'm quite sure that as soon as CN is available OpenBook's will get upgrades as well... :-D
2.5" HDD? Yes! That's awesome news for people who want to make this more usable. A 120 Gig HDD and 2GB of RAM would help make up for the slow-ish processor.
What is really the point of an external webcam on a device like this?
That touchpad is miniscule. It's like 2 USB ports wide! How could anybody use that?
A nano touchpad for a nano book.
@phoenix: On their website (viaopenbook), they have a tube, where some guy tells about its features, and he mentions the backside as an opportunity to record meetings/presentations (just don't want anyone to get in the way).
I think, that with the featurepacked vx800 chipset, the load on the processor won't be too massive, just get the right software to use the features (hardwaredecoders)