I ordered a touchbook from Always Innovating. on Nov. 15. It uses an arm cpu (A8 Cortex 600Mhz) and runs linux. They are a startup, and they have backlog so they don't process orders or charge you until they have enough stock. I probably won't get it until December. It has a usb bluetooth dongle in it, but I can't find out what kind. The specs just call it a Bluetooth Class 2.1 USB dongle powered by CSR chipset. I can't figure out what hardware that is by looking at the dmesg either, but no one seems to have complained about the bluetooth on it. Most of the complaints have been about build quality. Sometimes the batteries or counter-weights get loose, and you have to glue them back down. The first ones also had a problem where if you opened the screen past 90 degrees it would fall backwards. Also the software is Beta, but they tell everyone that straight up so... Anyway it uses a OMAP3530 soc like the beagleboard and Pandora. The graphics use closed drivers, and the dsp is programed with a closed source ti compiler. The odd thing is there is or was a gcc port to the TMS320C6x dsp's in 2004 and 2005. It did not at the time support the C64x dsp which is what the OMAP 3530 uses, and I can't seem to find any reference to anyone trying to do so. I would think someone would be making an effort on that front.

I've been thinking the same thing in regard to phones as computers (people were using zaurus's as computers years ago and those were using arm cpu's way less powerful than todays) and am probably getting a new phone in Dec or Jan so I've done some research on that. Most of the android phones out now use some kind ARM11 processor. Anandtech gave a fairly good comparison of Arm11 vs. Arm Cortex A8 during their iPhone 3g, iPhone 3GS, and Palm Pre comparisons. The articles are here, here, and here. The iPhone 3g uses a 412Mhz Arm11 while the iPhone 3GS uses a 600Mhz Cortex A8. The 45% clock speed boost resulted in between 42% and 200% faster in application load time and around 100% faster in browsing using either cellular or wifi. The articles talk about the CPU architecture differences between ARM11 and A8 Cortex. The articles also talks about some of the PowerVR graphics chips (the touchbook above uses a PowerVR SGX530 GPU), but doesn't go into as much detail about those. Apparently most phones use some kind of PowerVR chip. There is an additional artice from June, which is a large review of the Palm Pre, in which he says he expects multicore Cortex A9 phones to be out in around 12 months. I am not sure I see that as happening.

I have heard Android's bluetooth support is not currently very good. Specifically that it does not support bluetooth keyboards. They may have fixed that by now, I'm not sure, but they should definately fix it at some point. I am really surprised it has taken this long since they are using linux's bluetooth stack which does support keyboards as far as I know.

My sister has an apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse on her mac. The only real problems she has with it is when she has to replace the battery. The mac has "lost" the keyboard once or twice in the time she has had it and she's had to turn the keyboard on and off and what not to make the mac find it again. This is a ppc macMini, which tells you how long she's had it, and she has been using it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse since she got it or right near there. We did have to set those up using a regular mouse and keyboard at first I think, and I do seem to remember some sort of trouble getting the mac to recognize most of the mouse/keyboards we had since most of them were ps/2 not usb. I did borrow her keyboard once to see if it would work on a PS3, and it would not. Undoubtedly the little differences between an apple and normal keyboard were significant enough to prevent the PS3 from recognizing it.

Let me know if you want to tell you anything more about the touchbook when I get it. I could try pairing it with her mouse/keyboard, sending files to/from phones, sending files to her mac through bluetooth, whatever.