Viliv S10 Blade Hands-On: Super Thin Netvertible Should Turn a Lot of Heads

We first saw a pre-production model of the Viliv S10 Blade back at the Intel Developers Forum in September 2009. We were impressed with the 10.1-inch convertible touchscreen netbook then, but the product was months away from shipping and wasn’t yet in its final form.

When we met with Viliv this week at CES, we saw a close-to-finished unit and found out that the S10 should start shipping soon with a starting price likely somewhere between $500 and $600. Where in September the demo unit we saw had only single touch capability, the S10 we viewed this week now supports multitouch gestures on its resistive touch screen. The unit we saw this week also seemed to feel a little more solid in our hands than the one we played with at IDF.

The S10 Blade features a 10.1-inch touchscreen with a generous 1366×768 resolution, a 32 to 128GB SSD, a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom Z530 or 2-GHz Atom Z550 CPU, and Windows 7 home premium. Viliv incudes its own gorgeous touch UI for managing media and launching applications. At 2.7-pounds and 0.7-inches thick, the S10 is light and thin enough to carry anywhere. Portability is what Viliv hopes to provide as the S10 is supposed to get a full 10 hours of battery life and it has mobile broadband options to keep you connected from the road.

We look forward to getting a review unit of the S10 blade soon so we can put it through the paces. In the mean time, check out the video below to see the netbook in action.

Editor’s Note: We were so impressed with the Viliv S10, we named it as our Best of CES winner in the netbooks category.