Talking about cases, the new mini-ITX cases from AOpen are rather interesting, as they'll fit the standard Atom motherboards from Intel and most likely just about every other manufacturer out there. First up, we have the S150, which is likely be the most popular model as it's fairly low-cost. It has some neat features such as a front-mounted 3.5-inch drive bay that can accept either a card reader or a removable 2.5-inch SATA/USB drive.
It uses a slim optical drive and as such, AOpen has fitted a couple of extra USB ports behind the easily removable front panel. These are meant to be used with things such as Bluetooth dongles or wireless keyboard/mouse receivers, and it means that you don't need to have these things sticking out the back or side of your PC. There's also a low profile expansion card slot and side-mounted front USB and audio ports.
The Odysseus is a concept case at this stage, but we had to include a couple of pictures of this quite tiny and stylish case. With the whole green PC thing going on, AOpen was promoting this as a eco-friendly mini PC and considering that it would be using a mobile CPU and a very small and power efficient motherboard, this might not be too far off the truth.
The S100 was another interesting case; again, it takes standard mini-ITX motherboards, but as you can see from the picture, this one comes with the added advantage of being able to be mounted at the back of your display. The case will house a 2.5-inch hard drive, but no optical drive.
For those looking for a mATX gaming case AOpen was also showing off a new prototype, but we don't know if this model will actually make it into production or not. It looked okay and has a top-mounted handle for easier transportation.
One neat feature we spotted was a new cable management system which can be attached to just about any standard tower case and it could be very useful in an office just as well as at home. Hopefully, this is a product that will make it onto the market, as we'd get one for sure.
Finally, we want to finish off with a couple of slightly different products. First is a home entertainment PC with an iPod dock and this builds on AOpen's previous experience on building SFF HTPC barebones. This system will hopefully become available to system integrators later this year, but it all depends on the demand. It surely looks nicer than your average HTPC.
Last, but not least, we have a short video of a projector that AOpen was working on that can work as a multi-touch interface, just like the touch screen we saw from AOpen earlier in the week. The neat thing here is that it can be used on any flat surface, be it a wall, or as in this case, a table top. This product was in the very early stages of development and we wouldn't expect to see this any time soon. Still, it's a cool concept product and we hope AOpen can bring it to market for a reasonable price. You can find the video here.