Utilite Pro Review

My Utilite Pro has finally arrived! Admittedly it sat at my Mom’s house for a week before I finally booted it today, but I’m now ready to give my first impressions, plugged into a single ASUS 1920×1080 monitor.

Specs:

  • Freescale i.MX6 Cortex-A9 1.2 GHz Quad Core
  • 2 GB DDR3 1066 MHz RAM
  • 32GB mSATA SSD
  • 2x GBE
  • 2x HDMI
  • 4x USB
  • S/PDIF
  • uSD slot
  • Hardware Serial (with external adapter to DB-9)

Pretty cool. Performance marginally better than an ARM Chromebook of similar cost.

It ships with Ubuntu 12.04 with XFCE (Does that make it Xubuntu?). Most notable issues are a bit of instability (random crash notifications) and media issues associated with it being ARMv7. For example, Google Chrome is not available for ARM and it ships instead with the open source Chromium browser (the open source Flash-less cousin of the Google version).

Trying to get YouTube to work:

  • No Flash
  • Can’t install Flash or Chrome (not availble for ARM)
  • YouTube has a HTML5 fallback, but presents a prominent “missing plugin” announcement and doesn’t load HTML5 player
  • Plugins, opting in to the HTML5 trial, etc do not change this
  • Somehow it now loads the video and then presents an “This video is currently unavailable.” message

If anyone has had success with getting this to work let me know. I’ll update this as I continue to use it.