This is reposted from the original road test page...
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Mine arrived yesterday. I haven't had chance to do anything with it beyond unpacking it yet. I am hoping to have a play over the weekend.
First impression is the packaging at least is very 'hobbyist'. An inkjet printed cover sheet wrapped around the board is all the documentation there was. The boards themselves do look good quality though. There was an Amicus18 itself, a prototyping companion shield and a set of stackable pin headers for soldering to the shield. The shield is standard breadboard layout designed for placing DIP devices along the center.
One thing I hadn't realised before was that although there are three LEDs on the board, none are under user control. One is power supply presence and the other two are send/receive activity from the USB to serial converter. Given that the two example programs in the hardware manual are about blinking/PWMing LEDs, it would have been nice to have at least one available on an I/O port out of the box.
Personally, I would have loved to have seen a bank of LEDs on the board so that the state of at least one full port can be immediately seen. This is meant to be a prototyping/development board and I've found that a stack of LEDs can be of one the most useful debugging tools available. Plus flashing lights look cool 
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I tried to have a play on Sunday. The software installed fine (although the Amicus website is a little confusing as some bits talk about an IDE, some about a compiler but it doesn't make it clear that the two are actually the same thing).
I'm not a great fan of 'thow shalt use our IDE' type products. And this one really didn't get off to a good start with its colour scheme. I use a none standard colour scheme (basically white text on a dark background as I find it is much, much easier on the eyes than the Windows default white background). Unfortunately, this means I can't read any of the menus or toolbar text in the IDE because they use my Windows custom text colour but the IDE's own choice of background colour - white on nearly white. Also, the syntax highlighting has a limited range of colours available (there is no custom RGB values option) and doesn't even allow white let alone something unusual like orange.
I haven't tried writing much code yet so I can't comment too much on how good an editor the IDE is. Although it definitely has peculiarities compared to my preferred editor. Not sure I would call it better or worse than MPLAB's IDE yet. Need to try using it in anger first...
Moving on to the compiler, again there are lots of peculiarities compared to other languages I use. The last time I used BASIC was a BBC micro, but even over and above the language itself, it gives the impression someone deliberately set out to make the syntax as non C-like as possible!
More curiously, it is also very tailored to specific hardware. That is, the language itself has built in keywords for moving the cursor, drawing pixels, etc. on two particular LCD controllers (one Samsung, one Toshiba). There are also slightly more generic commands for using things like RC5 and Sony remote control protocols. Plus PIC specific commands for configuring PWM ports and such like. All of which should be very useful and time saving (as long as you are using the appropriate hardware).
The real surprise was when I actually tried to plug the board in and try out some of this funky compiler stuff. It was only then that I realised the board has a USB host port not a device port. This means you need a very unusual host to host cable. It seems there was one of these shipped with the board as part of the road test kit. Not sure if you get it as standard if you buy the Amicus18 retail. Alas, I put mine in the drawer when the kit arrived and completely forgot about it by the time I came to play with the board at the weekend! I will post more once I have reunited the cable with the board...
