In this latest set of operations, Dextre removed two safety caps, cut through two sets of thin retaining wires, and finally transferred a small quantity of liquid ethanol into the washing machine-sized module.

ENGADGET: Canada's Dextre robot refuels faux satellite from the ISS in first-of-a-kind test

Knobs and switches on its World Core synthesizer module adjust the game machine's maps, graphics, characters and even physics through voltage tweaks.

ENGADGET

Your mobile phone, acting as a store of your credit card data, sends it wirelessly to a nearby receiver, which could be another phone, a dedicated terminal, or a payments module embedded in, say, a vending machine.

FORBES: Mobile Payments Systems Cut Both Ways

Until now all these devices have been one-off prototypes, but CUPP's partnering with Origin to make the PunkThis board available as an option on the EON11-S. The machine we played with was a pre-production unit using CUPP's single core ARM module running Gingerbread, but the company is working on a multi-core version with Jelly Bean.

ENGADGET: Origin and CUPP wed x86 and ARM in 11-inch gaming laptop, we go hands-on (video)