Via ARTiGO A1100 PC

It’s hard not to love babies.  They’re cute and try so hard to mimic the behavior and capabilities of their “parents”.  Thus whenever I see an infant, puppy, or small form factor PC, I can’t help but stop and affectionately stare.  Such was the case with today’s announcement by Via of its ARTiGO A1100 DIY PC kit.

The palm-size Pico-ITX based ARTiGO A1100 barebones PC kit has all the underpinnings of a solid home theater PC, but could easily be adapted for almost any embedded computing application, unlike some other “digital media PCs”.  The A1100 is powered by the 1.2GHz VIA Nano 64-bit capable processor.  For video decoding, including those recorded in h.264 or WMV9 compressed high definition, a VIA VX855 media system processor offloads graphically intensive tasks from the CPU to create a well rounded chipset capable of supporting most modern multimedia playback.

The system supports a 2.5″ SATA hard drive and optional SD card reader.  There are (4) USB ports, while both an HDMI and VGA port compliment the video playback capabilities of the device.  An integrated gigabit CAT5 port and optional wireless 802.11b/g module provide network access.  And as if that wasn’t enough, this entire 5.7” x 3.9” x 2” package can be had for $243 ($199 if you’re one of the first 10 people to order).  That’s way cheaper than some of the Intel Atom based small form factor PC alternatives.  Check out the demo video below