>>Are the manufacturers supplying Android drivers for things like printers, cameras and scanners?
>>That would be pretty cool if they did.
>
>I think Android drivers for peripherals won't be a problem- I have Epson printer drivers on my tablet. But I wanted to be clear that AFAIK there is no emulator in Android to actually run Windows apps or something like that thing they have on Macs to run what is esentially a Windows VM.

USB recognition will get better - on small devices you already have a fair share of models supporting USB hosting capabilities. Picture a combined Linux and Android source on a grandpa box: should be no problem. Re WinVM: that IMO is due to the facts of Android to run each process as a java-like VM and being targeted first/optimised for ARM. Picturing again beefy grandpa box running basically Linux spruced up with android UI acceptance, no reason normal Linux VM's like Virtualbox should be dysfunctional... If you think of phones like Motorola Razr i with Atom and 1Gig of Ram plus mSDHC: creating a Virtualbox for that device should be much easier and imagine hooking up to big screen and keyboard, then running a VM of W98 or NT4/W2K on slow CPU and part of 32GBmSDHC or 64GB mSDXC - should be workable for minimal tasks like non-tasking Office97 or simple edit-run-cycles in vfp or python. Next generation of Atoms claimed to be twice as fast at lower drain should make it quite possible: Performance of VM should be better than best PIII and in PIV in most aspects, so not really bad for a small communication bone.