VIA has decided to help system builders a bit by launching a reference design for the very ultraportable market. The design is of course built on VIA’s own hardware. The small case measures (WxDxH) 240mm x 175mm x 36.2mm and weighs 2.2lbs (1kg). OpenBook sports a 8.9″ display with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels and a 4-cell 2600mA battery capable of up to 3 hours of battery time. The heart of the system is (of course) VIA’s new VX800 chipset and the C7M ULV 1.6GHz processor.
The design will be updated to include the upcoming VIA Isaiah as soon as it becomes available. The VX800 supports both processors, has an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) based on the VIA Chrome9 GPU and is capable of hardware acceleration of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC-1 and DivX. On top of that, it can output 8 channel HD audio.
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It also supports a range of networking connectivity through two different modules;
- Bluetooth, WiFi & LAN
- WiMAX or HSDPA or WCDMA 3.5G WiFi and Bluetooth (3-in-1 module)
It also has three USB ports, VGA output, 2MP webcam, 2.5″ 80GB harddrive (and up), up to 2GB DDR2 RAM, and a 4-in-1 card reader.
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Since it’s x86-based it supports all of the major operating systems on the market, from practically all flavors of Linux, up to Windows XP or Vista.
VIA even offers CAD files of the OpenBook over at the official OpenBook website: www.viaopenbook.com, along with plenty of other information on the internal design of the ultraportable. Below is a promotional video along with some pictures of the prototype case;
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