Advancing from Arduino to Realtek Ameba RTL8195: Is This a Good Next Step for IoT?

Hello Everyone,
After several projects with my arduino uno and mega, I think I am ready to move on to more advanced embedded systems programming with C/C++, such as with Arm cortex based microcontrollers. With the rising popularity of iot applications, I would also like to dip my toes into WiFi and seeing what can be done with it.I would just like to check in with someone experienced in this area to make sure I am going about this the right way.Going through en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wi-Fi_microcontrollers , I found out about the RTL8195 dev board from realtek's amebaiot lineup. The boards support wifi and nfc, and are also arduino compatible, which is as plus as i can reuse some of my old expansion boards. Programming can be done in both the arduino IDE or regular C/C++, which should help me get started from a familiar environment. There are also several code examples provided on the official website and video guides posted on youtube channel.To me, this seems to be a capable platform to start off on. What other aspects should I consider? Thanks for reading, and I appreciate all suggestions and recommendations.-Mark 

Mark,The Realtek part looks like it has a good feature set but I couldn't easily find a data sheet or manual on the manufacturer's web site. In my experience, you really want to have a manual or data sheet handy when using the more advanced features.The MediaTek MT7687 also looks like a nice part and the data sheet and manual are easily downloadable.The only part in that category that I've had any experience with is the ESP8266. I was using an Arduino interface and never got into the more advanced features.

You are right about needing the manual. I did some further digging and it seems that the manual and datasheet can only be downloaded together with code after registering for a free account. Thanks for the advice.I have heard that the ESP8266 and ESP32 are popular devices, but i feel that learning on an ARM-based system might provide more transferable experience in the future, since ARM chips seem to be everywhere now. Is this even a valid concern to be worried about?

Learning on an ARM-based system may provide more transferable experience. especially if you intend to write low level drivers for I/O interfaces. You may want to expand your search into ARM Cortex parts without on-chip WiFi. The Mbed system is ARM specific and supported by  several development boards with WiFi so you may want to search their site for suitable boards.
https://os.mbed.com/

I would suggest an STM32-based Nucleo64 board. You can choose a mid-segment board, such as the F4, which is based on an Arm Cortex-M4 core and can also include FPU for fast single precision floating point computation. A plugin for STM32 board is available for Arduino IDE, but you can choose other open source framework, such as TrueStudio or System Workbench for STM32. There is also a GUI-based configurator (STM32 CubeMX) through which you can configure the board (GPIOs, UART, SPI, I2C, interrupt, USB and so on) with just few mouse clicks. It also generates automatically the corresponding initialization code. The price corresponds to an official Arduino Uno board.