VIA's open source laptop design



VIA Technologies have made inroads into the buoyant UMPC market over the past few months with the same CPU and chipset technologies used on their Mini-ITX boards.

Their OpenBook is a low cost laptop design released under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, meaning OEMs can download the CAD files for nothing and create their own versions with just a nod to VIA. Specifications of course include a VIA 1.6GHz C7-M processor and VX800M chipset, with a wealth of wireless modules including WiFi/Bluetooth, AGPS, WiMAX, EV-DO, HSDPA and WCDMA all possible.

The OpenBook weighs 1Kg and measures 240 x 175 x 36.2mm with a 1024 x 600 pixel 8.9in screen, up to 2GB DDR2 RAM, a 2MP camera, memory card reader and a 4 cell battery giving 3 hours battery life.

The VX800M chipset is also new from VIA, and is the first to support both the C7-M and their forthcoming Isaiah processor, perhaps suggesting future OpenBooks will get a speed bump. The VX800M also supports MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC1 and DivX video decoding acceleration - however support for acceleration features on previous VIA chipsets has been weak, so we'll cross our fingers and reserve judgement until we actually test a VX800M based system.

VIA's OpenBook

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