Viliv S7 Atom-based UMPC

Posted on 21 August 2008, Last updated on 23 April 2009 by

With a slick design, 8+hrs battery life and a swivel touchscreen, this isn’t your average UMPC! It’s not exactly a netbook either. Viliv have taken the U5 design they demonstrated at CES, slightly modified the screen, dropped an Intel Atom inside (up to 1.8Ghz) and made what I think is a very stylish piece.

MVI_7036_0004MVI_7036_0005

Key features there are the 3G/4G module capability, 9 hours movie playback capability, GPS and the capability to take up to a 1.8Ghz CPU. (Silverthorne) The S7 is in final design stages (what you see is the final casing design) and is planned for launch in Q1 2009. There are no details about price or per-country availability at the moment.  More details and video after the specs….

MVI_7036_0003

Check out the presentation video below.

All specifications are now in the database.

48 Comments For This Post

  1. Bob vansteel says:

    I am really hoping this might be under $1000…but highly doubt it. Looks like it’s the new wibrain for me!

  2. Adam says:

    No mouse? Not enough RAM for vista, and the HDD is too small. 9 hours of 720p x264 is about 27GB of data. They should squeeze in a 2.5″ HDD and offer 320GB, that would be something. Besides from that it looks nice.

  3. chippy says:

    Wow. You dont ask for much do you ;-)
    Actually, I heard that it might take 2GB

  4. Bob vansteel says:

    in case you didn’t notice…there is a mouse. And 1gb of RAM is fine for vista…i could understand wanting more if you were doing more intense tasks, but seeing as this is an atom cpu we’re talking about and not a powerful quad/dual core, 1GB of RAM is really all you need for what the processor can handle. Yes, 2GB is great, but 1GB is fine.

  5. Mole says:

    Well I didnt notice the mouse because the device was turned off.I think he meant no track pad.Thats a no-go for me too.The rest looks good.

  6. Bob vansteel says:

    There is a Trackpad!!! look next to chippy’s right hand thumb in the first picture…whats that…a trackpad! HP/Acer style with the mouse buttons beside it. Lol…i think you might want to point that out next time you write an article on this bad boy chippy;)

  7. chippy says:

    I will be taking some more pics of this tommorrow lunchtime. Looks like they are needed!

    Steve.

  8. Bob vansteel says:

    Great! Can’t wait to see them…Heck All these new UMPC/Netbooks are making it soo hard to choose!

  9. yordan says:

    hello chippy i like the Viliv S7 Atom-based UMPC will you ever sell it and ask people about makeing more of them so any one could buy it.I suggest its $2000 or more but some day you have to lower the price when not so many people are buying it.I hope you get that Viliv S7 Atom-based UMPC in stores or in ebay or kijiji just email me at dannyboy@live.ca.

  10. Matt says:

    Device looks pretty amazing to me.

  11. pyr77 says:

    If thet can do 9 hours battery life why other companies can’t? Very nice device anyway.

  12. turn.self.off says:

    hmm, your next “toy” there chippy?

    as for dmb vs dvb, here in norway the national broadcaster is going for dmb as its more cost effective. and i do believe that germany recently gave up on dvb-h for mobile video. so it may well be that you can use that dmb reciever in germany at some point.

  13. chippy says:

    One thing to point out that completely makes sense.
    Only Vista and Moblin will give video players access to the hardware decoding of Poulsbo. The DX9 interfacing layer (DXVA I think) just doesn’t exist in XP. I guess there may be specific software solutions for this but it does look like that only Moblin and Vista will enable 1080p. [I’m noting this as you might be wondering why it says 1080i (Vista) in the specs.

    Also, Intel are now talking about 1080p for Poulsbo, not 1080i. Interesting!

  14. Schlave says:

    Wow great stuff there Chippy.

    Capable of 2GB RAM?
    1.86Ghz Atom?
    up to 9 hours battery?
    830g, nearly 300g lighter than my present Kohjinsha SR?
    Trackpad mouse (I hope)?
    Amazing form factor reminiscent of the Ipod?
    WINDOWS XP READY?

    Yeah so I’m starting to understand why you UMPC bloggers go through devices in half a year. :D

  15. kyuss says:

    looks like a strong competitor for the raon digital ever note…

    swivel screen, battery life, well placed trackpad (if that really is a trackpad) -> i would go for the S7 instead of the ever note at this point…also: size of the q1 -> really nice

    if they price it right, my feeling is that people gonna buy this machine :-)

  16. citrus538 says:

    Wow, I am very impressed. I can’t believe they fit a VGA connector on that thing, it looks so thin. GPS is very nice as well. I just wish the screen was a little bigger.

  17. tal says:

    Now ask them where is their 8.9″ version ;)

  18. chippy says:

    Funny!

  19. loko says:

    IT’S WONDERFUL!!
    Kohjinsha SC3 has nothing to do.

    A 8.9″ one would be perfect.

  20. Peter says:

    Would prefer if there was a version without swivel, but bit larger screen instead.

  21. Vakeros says:

    As it is a smaller screen (which is fine for the resolution) I would echo Chippy’s point about the need to get some sort of buttons on the screen for when in tablet mode.

  22. Llewellyn says:

    I prefer the convertible form factor…

  23. Judge says:

    wow that looks amazing! It looks like the umpc tablet market is really gonna hot up over the next 10 months. This device is really interesting it seem to combine the form factor of the SC3 with amazing battery life plus it seems less ‘executive’ than the sc3 in its styling and more ‘eee pc’ like. This hopefully means its gonna be cheaper.

  24. focus says:

    This is an impresive product,but what about screen?
    Is led backlight?Is sunlight visible?

  25. reverendo says:

    sounds interesting…. AND it has a swivel screen. did they say anything about what kind of touch screen we’re talking about?
    what kind of crystalmark scores could I expect with a 1.8 cpu?
    no express card?
    form factor seems quite perfect. a pity it looks like a toy
    upgrade possibility to 2 GB is great

  26. gfxzone says:

    now that’s something i fancy!

  27. quick says:

    Wow very impressive, to get that kind of battery life at that size and weight, while including a decent size keyboard and a swiveling touch screen is almost too good to be true. We’ll see I guess if they can pull it off on the final production model.

  28. Andario says:

    For those of us who greatly dislike thick bezels, this is not offense, this is insult.

    Another one down the hole for me! (and counting, counting, counting…)

  29. ProDigit says:

    Great review, looks like a good contender for the other devices out there, only a bit late now that information leaked about Intel creating a 2core version of the Atom probably announced 4Q this year.

    About the Resolution:
    Obviously there’s not much benefit from playing back 1080 pix video when the screen only supports 1024×600!

    But maybe there’s hope if the dockingstation allows an external monitor to be plugged in.

    Battery:
    8Hrs battery on paper is best so far! I wanted to see how much this would translate to be in real life.
    Even if manifacturers say 8 hours usually that means with brightness near to off, and volume near to inaudible, or with small headphones.

    As far as HD/ssd space:
    If the hd is connected via a pcie 1x slot, I expect great performance results to be possible (especially with SSD)!
    If it has a SATA/PATA connector for 1.8″ hd’s, that would be great for compatibility with other drives out there, but have a slightly slower performance.
    I’m sure by the end of next year that there will be +100GB HDD’s in the 1.8″ form factor.

    I agree with chippy, if you’d put a 2,5″ HD in the UMPC; more then half of the it’s size will be taken by the HDD. On such devices capacities for 1.8″ drives (upto 80GB at this moment?) is more then enough, unless you plan on downloading tens of gigabytes before you return home (cases like that are rather rare).
    I mean I’ve had my EEE PC 704 for about a year now, and I’ve went out to public hotspots to download the latest Ubuntu Linux that fitted on the allready crammed 4GB SSD drive; and that which didn’t fitted on the external SSD card or USB stick!

    1,8″ drives and SSD’s are generally slower then 2.5″ versions.

    Ram:
    I wonder when a manifacturer will come up with a device supporting 3GB RAM (2GB + 1GB) and a small 1.8″ 80GB HD, with a software hack that loads the OS into 1 GB of the 2GB RAMstick upon booting (kind of like a ramdrive) for better response time.

    I don’t agree with chippy saying that 1GB is sufficient for Vista. Remember that devices like this usually use shared Video memory, and at least 64MB for Vista only.
    When gaming I expect 256MB of ram to be allocated to the video. Then it would be beneficial to have at least 2GB of ram.
    For XP 1GB might suffice, allthough on my home computer I easely use more then 800MB RAM just browsing the internet and running acrobat reader and maybe an additional program.

    Seeing the low cost of RAM these days (especially when ordering BULK), devices like this should come with 2GB onboard soldered memory, and a extra SODIMM slot for additional (DDR2)memory.

    Going back to ramdrive:
    The RAMDRIVE would probably work for most Linux distributions, and WinXP/Win 98; but will probably not work for Vista due to it’s too large size.

  30. MyFuckingBlogWhoNoOneReads says:

    *well placed trackpad* ? The Everun Note is what I call well placed.

  31. Heavyharmonies says:

    8-9 hour battery life? Yeah right. I disbelieve.

  32. JLM says:

    Hi,
    What´s max RAM available?
    Has SSD option?
    Thanks!!!!

  33. Dorin says:

    you guys need to pay more attention, it says “9 hours movie playback”. playing movies is always a battery intensive action, if doing it inside of a Windows OS it would mean a “real world” battery of probably 15 hours or more. obviously this device is not going to get 15+ hours battery life, or even 9 hours. unless it has an absolute gigantic battery we dont see then the battery quote is probably that of a preboot Media Player environment.

    stop expecting miracles, do you really think some unknown company has come along & released a magical device this small that can beat everybody elses battery numbers?

  34. chippy says:

    It depends on what type of movie. looping an MPEG-2 clip takes very little power for example.

    Viliv are talking about 10 hours max on this device.
    Expect 7-hrs in-use (wifi etc)

  35. Mike Cane says:

    That’s very interesting. But between Q1 2009 and now, anything can happen.

    Someday, companies will unveil something and announce, “And you can buy it IN STORES TOMORROW!”

    Well, a company other than APPLE, that is. *smirk*

  36. turn.self.off says:

    if that ever happens, every company out there will be running their own shows so that they can time the release of things to them.

  37. Chris says:

    Any hints on price? It looks great, but it’s going to pillage my wallet isn’t it?

  38. Mark Ellis says:

    http://tinyurl.com/5spvm7 also looks an intersting device… the UMPC portal looks a good place for news

  39. Ryan says:

    SOLD. I can’t wait for this, I was looking at the SC3 for a while but this just blows it out of the water. Time to say goodbye to my Sony TX-750

  40. leo says:

    design of this device looks like shit :/ but functionality is not bad. Mmm… i don’t like it.

  41. Smoker says:

    Add mouse for a screen plzzz

  42. Umpc_Nut says:

    I was interested until I saw the word Atom.

  43. jambo says:

    it’s amazing!!!!!!
    do somebody know hou much it will cost?

  44. SkratchBoard.com says:

    We are drooling over the S7 as well. It’s got a lot of potential to be our “3rd device”, but we have a few suggestions on how to make it better.
    We blogged about it here: http://www.skratchboard.com/?p=353

  45. jjmaho says:

    it will be released under &800.
    there are minor spec change, though.
    from CES in LV in early this month,
    battery time changed to 7 hours cont’ playback with (i bilieve 35W battery).

  46. Darlene Sanchez says:

    Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! Good post.

  47. Steve 'Chippy' Paine says:

    @tmburke Yes, Have tested the S7 a few times. Proto: http://is.gd/u7hV Working: http://is.gd/u7ic

  48. jaime says:

    Just a quick question for those who really want a trachpad on the S7; why do you need a trackpad on a touch screen device?

    For my personal taste, if I really wanted a mouse function, I’d get a usb rechargeable bluetooth mouse.

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