A lot of fundamental stuff just isn't there.

I guess first off, it's fairly unstable. Pretty easy to get basic stuff to not work.

Any given thing doesn't work the way you expect in 2022, and I'd even argue the performance wouldn't have been considered acceptable in 2012 (that year the Galaxy S3 was around). In fact, I've found the performance to be lacking compared to much much older laptops running mobile chips like the Intel Atom.

The battery life is pretty flaky, though that's improved somewhat thanks to improvements in the 5.15 kernel. If you leave an application open, however, you're gonna suck up the battery very quickly. It doesn't put applications that are in memory but not currently active to sleep like android or ios does.

The base pinephone experience is one where you won't have access to most of what would make a linux phone good. Under Plasma Mobile, you need something that's aware that you're on mobile because it needs to present the keyboard if you click on an appropriate input field, so many applications just won't work unless you have the keyboard case. The zoom level is high enough that many desktop applications won't run correctly by default, you just won't be able to see anything. You need something that's programmed with running on a phone in mind. Phosh is better in that it will present you with an icon to bring up a keyboard, but the whole interface is fairly janky and neither of them run very quickly.

Everything seems to rely on wayland, and personally I suspect that might be part of the problem. They get some benefits that are relevant for mobile, but first moved to gnome on wayland and found it barely usable, and then moved to gnome on x11, and found the latter a lot more polished in a lot of ways, and absolutely a lot more stable.

Don't get me wrong -- I love that I have it, I love that it's an option, I love seeing things improve over time, and my hopes are high for the future of the platform, but it isn't really a usable product at this point. If you run a very basic setup and don't intend to do anything other than send and receive phone calls you might be ok, but that's not what people use smart phones for, and I think anyone who ended up trying to run a pinephone as a daily driver would be disappointed and would likely end up going back to their android or apple device at this point.

I should mention there are some other options too, an incomplete android port I've heard isn't really a good choice because it's not really fully set up, a webOS port that is pretty limited because webOS is pretty limited at this point, ubuntu touch is nice looking and felt nice when I ran it on a nexus 5, but it's very much a walled garden and you should not expect to be able to do a lot more than running web apps because ubuntu touch doesn't use wayland or x11, it uses a third option that doesn't support your typical linux applications.