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"Eve" - Eden-N based x86 Handheld
May 12, 2004

The Ministry of Mobile Affairs, a San Diego startup headed by two MIT graduates have a mission: to "lead the unified international effort to secure mobility", and to "ensure liquidity of borders, welcome the mobile masses and free the fun"... To do this, they've announcedEve, the first x86 compatible mobile gaming console. Eve is based upon VIA's new Grace platform, a low power consumption, high performance platform not dissimilar to that found on the forthcoming EPIA N motherboards.

Grace features the ultra-small Eden-N CPU, CN400 chipset with MPEG2 decoding and MPEG4 acceleration, and VT8237 Southbridge, and is by accounts a little thinner than the EPIA N, with slightly different I/O ports.

On Eve, this currently translates to a 533MHz Eden-N CPU, S3 Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics, 640x480 pixel 4" TFT screen, 128MB DDR266 SDRAM, 20GB Hard Drive, 2 x USB 2.0 ports, Microphone and Headphone sockets, Compact Flash slot, Smartcard slot, S-Video NTSC/PAL TV Out and integrated 802.11b Wireless LAN. The device is to be powered through a DC-In jack or using two hotswappable Lithion-Ion batteries, and MoMA plan to make the screen detachable, and the controllers swappable for different games. We don't know if one of these replacement controllers will be a wee keyboard, but we could always plug into one of the USB 2.0 ports.

Eve runs Windows XP Embedded edition, so it should boot quickly and be able to run PC games and applications (perhaps not Unreal Tournament, but we'll certainly be trying), and of course it will be able to playback music and video. Considering the Grace platform is x86 based, and seeing as one of the founders previously hacked XBoxes for fun, we would imagine installing Linux onto one of these puppies shouldn't be too difficult. It will be interesting to see how the Unichrome Pro graphics will compare against two other devices previewed this week, Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS - but neither will be able to match the functionality of Eve for other purposes.

Update: The Inquirer has some nice pictures