is bluetooth file transfer supposed to be horribly slow?

[Paul Johnson]

I have a Nokia N800 (linux!) internet tablet with bluetooth and a Dell
D820 Latitude laptop with bluetooth.  I have had trouble making the
two connect--cant find one clear explanation (HOWTO) of the process to
connect a laptop to another device and move files back and forth.
Anyway, after lots of fiddling with hcitool and gnome and kde
bluetooth regimes, I am able to hook the devices together and use the
Gnome file manager to right click a file and send it to the tablet.

But it is horribly slow.  An 8mb song file took 3.5 minutes to go from
the PC to the tablet via bluetooth.  The tablet also has a usb cable
connector and a wireless network card.  If I plug in the USB cable and
mount the tablet's drives on the laptop system, file transfers are
super fast.  Similarly, I can use the scp program on the tablet to
copy the same song file and it is much faster--8 seconds.

So, is bluetooth supposed to be much slower than USB connection?

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas