HackBerry A10 board

As always I'm on the look out for the next hackable board, my interest turned to the Gooseberry board which essentially is an tablet PCBA. I must commend the Gooseberry founder for sourcing such a board and neogating the price. For me the lack of Ethernet and USB ports means that it didn't fill my requirements. However the idea of sourcing existing PCBA's seems to be good one although this is not easy as most Chinese manufactures will only deal with you if your buying a 1000+ units. Another drawback is that existing PCBA most likely won't have GPIO,I2C,SPI interfaces.

Having spent a few months trying to source a board the closest I could come to a useful board is this pcba.

Hackberry A10 available to buy from here . 

Its a small (approx 10cm x 8cm) board supporting a A10 (All Winner) cpu. After drawn out neogations with the manufacture I got them to produce me 2 boards with 1GB ram and 4GB flash which I have just received. The board by default boots Andriod 4.0 and has the following specification:

A10 All Winner

4GB Flash

1GB Ram

2 x USB

1 x Ethernet

1 x Wifi

1 x HDMI

1 x headphone

1 x mic

1 x component video

1 x infra red sensor

1 x 5v power socket

1 x SDHC slot

The board does seem to hold some potential as there seems to be place holders for additional connectors. Furthermore it looks like the board has a multi-purpose layout, as there seems be to markings for the SDHC connector to go on the front or back of the board, similary this also applies to the USB connectors. Sadly theres no GPIO or SATA (unlike the Mele boxes).

Here's a further update about the board.

My first attempt at booting Ubuntu and Puppy Linux is here.