Out of the four notebook models that ViewSonic launched yesterday, the ViewBook Pro is possibly the most interesting of them all. It shares an aluminium-alloy chassis design with a certain other notebook family that also carries the Pro moniker and we're sure we don't have to tell you who it's from.

At 1.68cm thick, albeit at its thinnest point an 1.6kg the 13.3-inch ViewBook Pro can hardly be called bulky. What makes it a bit more special is the fact that ViewSonic has managed to squeeze in an optical drive, which is no mean feat considering how thin and light the ViewBook Pro is. The optical drive can be swapped for a second battery which adds about 100g of weight, but also an extra four hours of battery life. With two batteries the ViewBook Pro is good for up to 12h of untethered usage.

The 13.3-inch display offers a resolution of 1,280x800 and it has LED back lights which should allow for a more evenly lit display which uses less power and won't suffer from any degradation in light intensity over the years. ViewSonic has based the ViewBook Pro on Intel's CULV (Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage) platform and as such it's using one of the new Core 2 Duo 7300 processors which is clocked at 1.3GHz. It also features the Intel GS45 chipset with integrated graphics.

Other features include 2GB of DDR2 memory which can be upgraded to 4GB, a 320GB 5,400rpm SATA hard drive, an ExpressCard 34 slot, HDMI output, a biometric finger print scanner, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, onboard Ethernet, a memory card reader, a 1.3Megapixel webcam, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a D-sub connector and a headphone and microphone jack. ViewSonic referred to the keyboard as a "floating island" type keyboard, but most of us know it as a chicklet keyboard. The touchpad supports multi-touch and gestures.

A couple of other features that that aren't so noticeable is the ViewSensor which will activate if you drop the notebook. It will park the hard drive read and write heads so that the hard drive has a better chance of surviving the drop. There's also a built-in anti-theft feature which allows you to enable an alarm, so that when the notebook is lifted off the surface it is sitting off, it'll start to beep loudly.

ViewSonic has also done some interesting things with the biometric fingerprint scanner. It does of course allow you to use your finger print to log in to Windows like every other implementation, but it can also be used for storing passwords to various applications so you can swipe your finger instead of entering your login details. Furthermore it can be set up so that different fingers launches pre-defined applications and there's also an option to create an encrypted folder that will only open if the correct finger print is used.

ViewSonic will be offering two SKU's of the ViewBook Pro, one comes without the optical drive and it is expected to retail for about €677 ($1015) while the model with the optical drive will set you back €718 ($1076). The ViewBook Pro comes with Windows 7 Home Premium and a copy of CyberLink MediaShow 5. The ViewBook Pro should be available from early November.