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All of the soldering seemed fine and this appears to be a solid-built board (unlike the other reviewer noted). I guess he got a [I'm assuming relatively] rare defective board. However, that's not to say that there aren't problems. It would seem that there are some issues with the Arduino IDE (1.6.7) recognizing this board and uploading sketches to it. I installed the curie core, but get compiler warnings and error messages like crazy (like 50 or so lines and sometimes an indefinite hang) when uploading an example sketch to the board. Sometimes, the sketch loads, sometimes it's rejected with errors, and these are simple example sketches. Often times, it takes uploading the sketch over and over again about 10-20 times before the sketch actually loads (though not without errors and warnings in the console), even when the sketch loads and appears to work fine on the board. This is true, even for the simple blink example. Other basic example sketches simply refuse to load at all, or give unpredictable data, such as using the curieIMU examples. I haven't yet used the curieBLE examples, as I literally just got the board in the mail a couple of hours ago. There are clearly some issues with this board working properly with the Arduino IDE and a quick google search would confirm that these problems are systemic. A few solutions and "work-arounds" are offered, which I haven't tried yet, but these "work-arounds" seem to have mixed results, with the majority of people claiming that the various "work-arounds" don't work. I do hope however, that these issues are fixed soon, as the board itself, when it works, seems like a blast -far better than the $6 cheaper UNO, though only if the bugs are worked out. Until then, for beginners at least, I would stick with the Redboard, Arduino Pro or Pro mini (I would advise AGAINST buying the UNO as the purchases don't support the Arduino community and further development of the ecosystem, including software). I guess $30 isn't that big of an investment for a board with cool features but that has a lot of bugs to be worked out. Am I happy with my purchase? That seems like a loaded question. I wouldn't buy another one, that's for sure, at least until the issues are worked out, but I also won't be asking for a refund either or letting it collect dust on my workbench like the PCDuino 2, Udoo Quad and a plethora of other dev boards I bought into over the years. I'm happy I got this board, and plan to have as much fun as I can with it (teaching and learning) with my 8-year old son, and I'm happy this is supporting Arduino.cc. However, and with all of that said, I think a photon for $10 cheaper or the Photon Redboard by Sparkfun is much better investment of your time and money. It has a different feature set, obviously, but the platform is rock solid. So if you are on a tight budget and want a full-featured, rock-solid board, I would go with Particle's Photon, but if, like me, you like exploring new boards and platforms with ever unique features and novel hardware, while having $30 to burn, then it might be worth getting, just expect to encounter problems for the foreseeable future.