Viliv UMPCs get upgraded in Las Vegas

Korea's well-known UMPC builder Viliv had a presence at CES, and Electronista had an opportunity to try its newest and most unique model, the S10 Blade. While it looks like a conventional 10-inch convertible tablet on the inside, the system is surprisingly aggressively equipped and feels like it: the system always uses an SSD for storage and is fairly responsive compared to the sometimes churning netbooks it's up against. It should also be faster in subtler ways as it uses either a 1.8GHz or 2GHz Atom underneath, although in a subjective test it's hard to tell the difference versus a 1.6GHz chip.

Like most touchscreen netbooks coming out post-Windows 7, the Blade has a 10-inch multi-touch display and is responsive in those apps and situations where it works well. We found that finger touch didn't always work well, however; despite Microsoft's protests, Windows isn't fully optimized for touch and still needs a stylus in some areas. Thankfully, Viliv provides one out of the box.

Ergonomically, the Blade is rare these days in abandoning gloss for a matte black finish, but its non-touch input is nothing unique. The keyboard is strictly average for a 10-inch netbook, and the trackpad is smaller than we would like (if at least efficient with its space).

There's no word on how the S10 Blade will reach the US, but it should have a fairly lengthy 10-hour battery life and will have the option of 3G or WiMAX besides the usual Wi-Fi. It should make for a useful alternative to netbooks like ASUS' T101MT.

We also briefly tried the N5, though time constraints prevented obtaining photos; it's typical of a small wave of clamshell UMPCs, though, and anyone familiar with UMID's mBook line (which we tried at the spring CTIA show) will find it familar. While it's impressive to fit a 1024x600 resolution and a keyboard into a system whose display is just 4.8 inches across, in practice the N5 is only for the particularly dedicated: at such a high pixel density it's hard to read content without expanding the font size, and the keyboard while larger is unlikely to be used for more than short writing. We'd rather use the all-touch X70 (also at the show) as it at least uses a 7-inch screen.

Photos of the S10 as well as Viliv's existing S5, S7 and X70 UMPCs are available below.

S10 Blade



S5



S7



X70



N5 (for reference)

By Electronista Staff