With all the hype surrounding Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized, low-cost developer board, little attention is being paid to the new kid on the block : Meet the Hackberry A10 Developer board.

Promoted by Miniand, this board may not be as cheap as the $35 Raspberry Pi board, but it is much more powerful than it's popular counterpart. To start with it has a 1.2GHz ARM Coretx-A8 Allwinner A10 processor, as opposed to the Pi's 700Mhz processor.

It also has upto 1GB of DDR3 RAM, support for 802.11n Wifi, 2 USB slots abnd 4GB of internal storage, all of which are lacking on the Raspberry Pi board. The Mali400 GPU on the SoC will enable the board to play HD video with much more ease.

The Hackberry will ship with Android 4.0 ICS, but since it has the immensely popular Cortex-A8 processor, it would be a matter of time before someone ports other Linux Distros like Ubuntu, Fedora , Angstrom, etc. on it.

All this for an additional $25 seems to be a really good deal. Apparently a lot of hacker enthusiasts think so too. Miniand plans to release two configurations of the board, one for $60 having 512MB RAM and the other for $65 with 1GB RAM. The latter is due for late August, but currently both the models seem to be out of stock.

It's good to see a healthy competition even in the low-margin, low-cosr developer board market targeted for prototyping the next waveo of low-cost embedded Linux devices.