I don’t see this as a breakthrough idea but it finally came to the end user: the possibility to customize the look of your notebook. Not just any notebook, a quite good one actually, with powerful hardware specifications powered by VIA.

What can I tell you about VIA?
Several years ago, the mainboard market had a few players. The most powerful were SIS, Intel and VIA. These 3 companies were the major developers of mainboard chipsets and other services and products. During that time VIA was on top. Another information regarding VIA is that along the years they’ve made important acquisitions from Cyrix CPU to S3 graphic cards line.

Being in a very competitive market - pc components, VIA started to embrace the small, light, low-power components. This move was also because it was clear that against nVidia, AMD or Intel they couldn’t win. So in the small form factor area, they’ve developed several products towards the mobile industry. A year ago, in 2007, they announced the availability of VIA Nano Book which was a small notebook with a quite strange design. Well regarding this product, the good reviews were not so good. So learning from their mistakes, and from the trends imposed by the market, a new concept was brought to the table - OPEN.

So what does OPEN in terms of hardware mean?
From VIA’s perspective, OPEN is related to the visual aspect of the notebook - VIA OpenBook. Their main idea is that anyone can customize the look of this mini-laptop. For this to happen, they’ve made available all the CAD filer for the OpenBook design. In this way you can design your own notebook but I don’t know what will happen with the design.

The main idea is that the design is open for new suggestions beside the standard design. The other big plus is that the specifications are quite good, and the hardware will enable the user to use different kind of operating systems - even Vista.

You can check the video on Techcrunch or you can look for more details on their new website http://www.viaopenbook.com/.

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