Getting your hands on the CuBox-i4Pro for the first time is kind of funny. You can hold it in your hand. It doesn’t weigh much. It seems like a matte black paperweight was left on a desk at a new company. Still, that 2.17-inch cube has a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA, HDMI 1.4 with 3D support, Bluetooth, and WiFi. There’s a lot to take in.
The device was made by the Israeli company SolidRun, which has been making small single-board computers for a while. Their Hummingboard got some good attention from developers and competed quietly but seriously with the Raspberry Pi. But the CuBox-i4Pro is not the same. It’s not a blank board that you put in a case. The package comes in a clean, finished cube that looks more like a product than a prototype.
One of the first things you notice is how well it’s put together. The ports on the back are thoughtfully placed: a power plug, Gigabit Ethernet, a full 1080p HDMI port, a microSD card slot, two powered USB ports, an eSATA II port, and a micro USB to RS232 port. There is an infrared port on the front that can both receive and send signals. This is a small detail that is important if you want to use this as a media center. The optical audio out is on a face next to it. There’s nothing cheap about it. There’s no shaking.
The CuBox-i4Pro has a Freescale i chip inside it.The MX6 Quad core SoC has a speed of 1GHz and comes with 1066Mbps DDR3 RAM and a Vivante GC2000 graphics unit. It comes with a 4GB microSD card that already has Android on it. Change that card out, and you can run Debian Linux. If you work in security research or penetration testing, you can flash it with Kali Linux. That the machine can work in all three environments without any problems shows that the flexibility is real.
One thing that shouldn’t be hidden is that the Gigabit Ethernet connection, even though it’s advertised as 1000Mbps, is really only capable of 470Mbps because of limitations in the system. There is a trade-off there that most home or hobbyists won’t care about, but you should know about it before you build a network-heavy app around it.
One of the more interesting things about this is that it works with Kali Linux. There is a script in the Kali ARM build scripts that is just for the CuBox-i4Pro. You don’t just point and click; you have to work in terminal, use dd to flash an image onto a microSD card, turn on the device, and then move on. You need a Class 10 microSD card with at least 16GB of space. It’s easy for someone who is already familiar with Linux environments. There is a learning curve for people who are new to ARM-based computers, but that’s the case with most of them.
The CuBox-i4Pro is in an interesting price range at $139.99. The price isn’t the lowest for a mini-PC, but it’s a lot less than what you’d expect for such a well-made device. It’s a great choice for OEM projects, home media systems, or light development environments because it supports Android, is flexible with Linux, has a small form factor, and has good finish quality.
When you use a device like this for a while, you start to think that most of the infrastructure for computers is much bigger than it needs to be. You won’t be able to use the CuBox-i4Pro instead of a workstation for everything. It does, however, imply, in a quiet and unassuming way, that powerful computing can fit in a very small space on your desk.
