BlueDevil: a new KDE bluetooth stack

And one on the library backing things: http://blog.ereslibre.es/?p=253

The ultra-cheap dongles are broken as far as I can tell. These are the dongles that when you use them they automatically already have programmed some devices into them you can't get rid of. That is bluetooth addresses show up that you never used, nor any device you know of uses.

I had a dongle that I used for a while that got a bit unfortunately melted. It worked fine had great range and bluetooth audio with pulseaudio was very reliable.

That was the second one I ever bought. The first one was this rocketfish item that had a sort of odd built-in USB hub. I think it depended on how Windows XP initialized USB devices in order to detect the items plugged into the hub. I don't remember much about it. It got sucked through the wash.

The third one I purchased the cheapest one I could find locally because I needed something quickly. I had nothing but problems with it. File transfers were slow and unreliable... audio got out of sync, failed to connect, randomly failed to scan properly, and all sorts of problems. The extra 'ghost' devices that shown up made me paranoid.

Got tired of that and eventually ordered this bad boy from Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833...

It has the description of:
AZiO BTD-V201 USB 2.0 Micro Bluetooth Adapter (Class 1, V2.1 + EDR)

It shows up as:
Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

This has made a big difference in performance and reliability. Now my bluetooth headphones and my Android phone are detected and work very well with it. Detected everything the first time, no audio drop outs as long as I stay in range. (and the range is pretty good for a tiny dongle)