The performance of the Pine Phone leaves *a lot* to be desired. I set
mine up on wifi to experiment with before moving my SIM over, and had
such a poor user experience that I never bothered.
That's purely a poor *user* experience. From a tinkering point of view,
I enjoyed it. So I guess figure out what your desire is before buying
the phone.
It might be more worthwhile to get a mainstream phone that still has
decent postmarketos support (Pixel 6a from memory, but don't quote me on
that).
Yeah. I had to install a different modem firmware in order to get a somewhat reliable connection, but even then it ran hot and drained battery very fast.
I agree that they are cool tinkering devices and I want the Linux on phones/tablets experience to continue improving.
Despite not being truely FOSS, I really liked Palm's WebOS phones. Linux
under the hood, running pulseaudio for sound routing. Basically user
accessible out of the box.
The n9 was similar. Debian under the hood with sudo access. And an amazing camera!
When Apple unveiled gesture based navigation on iOS I was so angry cause maemo and meego both had that years before Apple. But that's true of the open source world quite often.