Thinking more about the minimal Bluetooth implementation on mobile phones (even though they have the power longevity to run for days with bluetooth active), I’m wondering if that is a deliberate design choice. After all, applications & services built on top of pervasive adhoc networking offer (at first glance) little revenue for telcos — all the traffic, all the action is local & unchargable. Far more profitable from their point of view to offer location sensitive services which depend on a hierarchical client-server model, with all traffic, even between peers, running over their high-margin networks.
Pure speculation. Would be interesting to see what’s actually possible on the current smartphone platforms: whether Bluetooth-fueled p2p is actually possible, or whether the APIs themselves are deliberately crippled.