Have you looked at grapheneOS? Its essentially a fork of the android open source project with extra privacy features. So, regular android apps still work for the most part, but you dont have google spyware built in.

Same, I was ready to just buy the first chinese mini pc that had the 128G strix halo processor. This is way better as it will have actual support and likely be better made.

It does ok with that. better than the default model, but worse than the built in search on my phone.

The best one I have found was one of the newer ones that was added a few months ago. ViT-B-16-SigLIP__webli

Really impressed with the accuracy even with multi word search like “espresso machine”