That box you see above? It's a quad-core ARM-based PC running Ubuntu called Utilite. The desktop system, made by Compulab, will be available next month starting at $99. While there are plenty of Android dongles built on ARM SoCs out there, few (if any) can truly offer a PC-like experience. The company -- best known for its Trim Slice, Fit-PC and MintBox products -- wants to change this.

Utilite packs a single-, dual- or quad-core Freescale i.MX6 Cortex-A9 MPCore processor (up to 1.2 GHz), up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM (1066MHz), an mSATA SSD (up to 512GB), WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI and DVI-D outputs, two Gigabit Ethernet sockets, four USB 2.0 ports, one micro-USB OTG connector, audio jacks (analog and S/PDIF), a micro-SD XD slot and two ultra-mini RS232 interfaces -- phew!

Rounding things up is support for OpenGL ES, OpenVG and OpenCL EP plus multi-stream 1080p H.264 on-chip decoding. All this fits in a chassis mesuring just 5.3 x 3.9 x 0.8 inches (135 x 100 x 21mm) and only consumes 3-8W using a 10-16V supply (unregulated). Those are impressive specs for the price, and the system sure looks positioned to compete favorably with some of the x86 boxes out there.