Heard on a vid. the Pine phone is failing, any updates?
The devices work, more or less. You can expect the most important hardware to work (namely the modem). Don’t expect anything out of the camera, though. Grainy greenish images at best, broken at worst. Other things like compasses and GPS, even if they worked, your next problem would be finding reliable software to actually make use of them.
I daily-drove a Pinephone Pro for about three years, starting in early '22. I’ve learned a lot about how mobile phones actually work, but it has been a largely painful experience, with many broken or half-broken features. SMS works, but MMS is spotty, and KDE’s Spacebar (SMS/MMS app) has a lot of issues that have not been resolved. ModemManager also can’t switch APNs, so the MMS flow is generally broken if your carrier uses separate APNs for MMS applets.
Unfortunately, in general, software support has progressed very slowly. It is worth remembering that these phones are made up of software from multiple different domains, and a myriad of different authors (starting from the Kernel, to the modem firmware, up to the mobile OS (GNOME/KDE), and various FreeDesktop/etc. projects like ModemManager). Not everyone has time to dedicate to these projects, especially the mobile variants.
Phosh is probably more stable than KDE Plasma Mobile, but the latter typically has more feature support. Your mileage will ultimately vary on which mobile OS you choose to run on the device.
At this point, you may have better luck with the “Don’tbeevil” SailfishOS adaptation for the PinePhone, though I had issues with SMS I was unable to resolve. Probably is fixable, though.
Manjaro has been working hard at getting ARM stable updates back out, but these problems notwithstanding: KDE 6 appears to have some severe graphical issues that still need resolving, and they break fundamental parts of the mobile UI flow (particularly app switching, and the navbar).
TL;DR: mileage is going to vary big time; you may as well try every OS to find out which one’s level of stability and feature-support is tolerable to you. After three years of daily use of my PPP, I can no longer tolerate the problems, and the KDE 6 update put the nail in the coffin for me. Give it another five years maybe lol.
I’m very happy with my Pinephone.
Great connectivity, even in my area where connectivity is bad, it beats my partners Android.
Camera, good phone photos, as good as, or as bad as, anything I was able to take on my Androids, or my partners Android… I’m not a fan of the quality of Phone Cameras, compared to the real thing they are pretty ordinary, on all phones.
Wifi works well, Bluetooth works well, Connection Sharing works well, all comparable with any Android I’ve owned.
… and unfortunately SMS works properly. My last three Androids, it didn’t, which made me very happy.
My Pinephone came with a Hub so I am able to use it as a normal Linux Computer. Mostly though I ssh into the device, to share files.
Initially it seemed a bit hard on the battery, but after a bit of fidling with the power settings, It doesn’t seem any more power hungry than any Android I’ve owned.
Any one who is telling you Linux powered phones are no good is telling you porkies.