It's great that Lattice is coming out with even cheaper FPGA dev board options. The bare-bones student dev kits from Altera and Xilinx are typically around $70, but $25 is a low enough price for hobbyists and beginners to begin experimenting as well.

I'm not too sure about the USB stick form factor, though. I have Texas Instrument's F2013 dev board[0], which is also a USB stick-type device. It's adorable; it's cute; and it has everything you need on-board (both the emulator and target), but you end up not being able to do anything very useful with it (unless you get very creative[1]). Hack-A-Day seems to agree[2].

Part of the reason this eval board is so cheap is that most FPGA evaluation boards have a bunch of peripherals that you can toy around with. My worry is that the lack of peripherals, low number of I/O pins, and the USB form factor might work against the product. That said, it does have an IrDA transceiver, which should enable some cool demos like acting as a TV remote.

If you're looking for a cheap FPGA board to use as part of a greater project, take a look at Lattice's iCE40-HX8K Breakout Board[3]. It's double the price, but it has all the basics and has tons of I/O to use. You can see Mike from mikeselectricstuff use it in his iPod Nano LCD project here: http://youtu.be/IIR1Bw8T_vM .

[0]: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...

[1]: http://forum.43oh.com/topic/248-ezprobe-ez430-based-logic-pr...

[2]: http://hackaday.com/2011/01/30/hands-on-with-ez430-f2013/

[3]: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...