I think Ben gave the wrong impression there, as I have more than enough PCs in my house as it is, so gettting one to dev on wouldn't be a problem. When Ben stated "number of functions" he meant that we want the SBC to be as generic as possible not that we wanted to use the SBC as a general PC.
What we are looking is a SBC with as many Features as possible in the sense of USB, ethernet ports etc at minimum cost (we are only starting out so dont want to commit too much cash to it in case we decide its not for us =A3100-=A3150 is not unreasonable imo but much more than that and its a no go.) so that we can do multiple projects on it without having to go out and buy a new SBC each time.
The specs we agreed it should have as min:
200Mhz CPU 32Mb RAM (we would prefer 64 but that is price dependant) 256Mb On board flash (we could get away with smaller but I'd rather start big and scale down, although a board that uses SD cards instead is also acceptable). 2x USB host ports (minimum, 4 at most) 1x Ethernet port (Again *if* we could find one with 2 that would be better as one of the projects we had in mind was a network based one) case (if possible to protect the board (from my tea addiction :) ) )I realise I may not even get all that with our budget, everything except the 2 USB ports and the ethernet port can be adjusted to keep the price down.
The main reason for a desire to learn embedded programing comes from the very low power overhead of an embedded system.
Thanks to all that have taken the time to reply.
We are still looking at boards but hopefully we can decide which one to use soon..