Arrived in the post today..
I also got a prototype board to make getting at the GPIO pins a bit easier
Physically it's a bit bigger than the BBB
In the box you get a usb to minature barrel connector power lead and a combined sata + power lead that's only really suitable for 2.5" drives due to the lack of 12v
It comes with a version of Android pre-installed on it's 4G nand flash that allows you to have something up and running a few minutes after opening the box.
You can't really do a lot with the Android image, so I quickly replaced it with one of the debian images from cubieboard.org
Not sure if it's just down to the A20 being fairly new and the drivers not having caught up yet or what, but the display resolution seems to be fixed at 1280x720 which my 20" 1600x1200 monitor really doesn't seem to like. So initial start up was somewhat frustrating. The cubieboard logo flashes on the screen for a second or two and then the screen blanks. Connecting it to a 1920x1080 gives better results, but seems to have a large overscan by default in linux text modes.
As you'll see in the photos, I've soldered on some relatively heavy power leads, partly due to some concern that the rather flimsy power lead was causing the display problems due to low-ish voltage and partly to make it easier to do some current measurements.
With nothing connected, current peaks at around 360mA during boot and then settles to ~200mA when idle. This is reasonably impressive considering it's running the performance cpu governor and so isn't benefiting from power savings in the way the BBB does.
Connecting ethernet raises the idle current to ~250mA
Adding a CPU intensive task adds approx 100mA per core, peaking at around 460mA
With a 500Gb 2.5" drive plugged in and active it's possible to get up to about 1A if you're stressing everything simultaneously.
First impressions are that that it's a decent board. A better, or at least more common, power connector would have been appreciated as it initially left me no option but to connect to a PC's usb port that likely wasn't capable of supplying the 5v @ 2A that's silkscreened on the board.
The debian image I'm using feels a little sluggish, but that's fairly normal. I'll reserve further judgement until I get something installed with a bit less baggage.
One slightly disappointing piece is that there's no way to supply power apart from the barrel connector, or soldering on a connector to some unpopulated pads directly below it. Other boards (RPi, BBB) can have power supplied via their GPIO connectors, but it doesn't seem so simple here.
Price wise, I was about 80 GBP delivered. So we're obviously not in RPi / BBB territory, but it does sit in a reasonable place between the BBB and Sabre-Lite. You get dual-core, 1GB ram and SATA on top of the BBB, while being 2 cores, gigabit network and PCIe short on the Sabre-Lite. The Sabre-Lite arriving at around 155 GBP makes the Cubieboard an interesting compromise. As the A20 uses an A7 series core which is feature compatible with A15, it also gives an easy path to future upgrades.
