I HAVE A DREAM Up-board, a middle point between RPi & NUC?

[TirsoJRP]

Up-board is an x86 board inspired by the RaspberryPi, it completely clones the RPi2 layout and adds USB3 OTG.

At US$99 with a 16GB emmc, 2gb ram and gigabit this could be a nice option for appliances such as IPBX, pfsense, etc. [32/4gb option available]

I am definitely getting one.

 

[magna.vis]

Everyone always sees these smaller devices as pfSense (or equivalent open source firewall/UTM distro) potentials. For the $100 base layout, then case and stable PSU, additional gigabit USB Ethernet adapter (with Linux support, mind you), one may as well actually lay out the money for the real thing. And never-mind wanting more than two gigabit ports, unless you want to pay for a USB 3.0 hub, and then who knows what kind of crazy things you may have to deal with. This may be a decent PBX, but the real price gap between the RPi and devices like the NUC (and there are already cheaper Atom offerings in between), this thing is going to swim in an already saturated market at a price point it thinks it can compete at for one reason: it's x86 that looks like a Pi.

Cool device, I just can't think of anything that I would use it for. Maybe a better media center than a Pi? Even then there are significant limitations compared to the NUC, and if I were willing to cut those features out I'd go down to a Pi.