I woke up this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox containing pictures of something promising to shrink the size of my UMPC. Fortunately, I didn't have to dredge the e-mail out of the spam trap, because it was talking about the world's smallest x86 platform, the VIA Mobile-ITX.

Take a look at the big chip with the VIA logo in the middle, that's the VIA VX700 chipset, a combined northbridge and southbridge which handles all the memory, graphics, & storage. The little black chip to the right of that that says C7-S is actually a miniaturized version of the same C7-M found in popular UMPCs like the OQO model 02 or the Samsung Q1B. The one in this photo is a 1.0GHz chip with a 400MHz front side bus.

I won't pretend to know how VIA's engineers have managed to shrink their current UMPC platform so much, all I can do is marvel at the feat. Looking at this tiny motherboard I can just imagine all the tiny little UMPCs we'll be seeing at this time next year.

Take a look at a few more pictures after the jump and then check out the Mobile-ITX Gallery.