The HiKey board has different pros and cons. Pro: It's received a lot more engineering time, as it was the first 96board. Actual open source first stage bootloader, from what I can tell. Con: WiLink8 WiFi; Initially unobtainium as "produced" by Circuitco in homeopathic doses; HiSilicon also needs quite some proprietary blobs for things.

So far ALL 96borads have their problems and surprisingly all of them seem to violate the LINARO/96boards spec in multiple ways.

The onboard eMMC is also extremely slow, luckily it's easy to switch it to boot off a microSD instead.

The kernel forked at 3.17 and hasn't been updated since.

So far I'm pretty disappointed, both hardware and software wise. I find it surprising Linaro would put their name on this, I really hope this isn't the "reference" for quality.