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World's Smallest PC?

It's not exactly a product. You can't buy it. You can barely even see it. But a team from National Taiwan University is at CES showing off an ultra-small PC and looking for commercialization partners.

The MTube is 3.3 inches by 3.3 inches by .8 inch thick. It runs Linux on a 1-GHz x86 CPU made by VIA, and has a VGA touchscreen. It may not be the tiniest PC in the world, but it's got to be close.

It was designed by a team of researchers at National Taiwan University, and they are showing it off in three configurations -- as a simple digital picture frame, as an Internet-connected digital video player, and as a WiMax-equipped streaming server for video.

The MTube isn't exactly a full-fledged PC -- there's no internal battery, for instance, and the WiMax support in the demonstration unit is a spaghetti tangle of breadboarded circuitry. But it does neat tricks like speech recognition and picture-in-picture. And it's small.

The MTube's 2.8-inch display puts it in the same class as the digital camera screen on the left, but it's a full-fledged PC with Bluetooth and wireless support and Firefox built in. Click to Enlarge

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