I've got a Pinephone (the UBports CE, though I'm mainly running Mobian right now) Short term, the use cases are as hacker mobile Linux devices with most of the mobile hardware working (device drivers are still a WIP, Linux text/server software works flawlessly, GUI software is hit-or-miss right now) Long term, I'm expecting them to be perfectly serviceable basic mobile handsets. But they are still a ways off from being 'daily driver ready' (i.e. power management isn't in the same league as other mobile devices and quite a bit of flaky/missing functionality) Another area still needing work is that there are only a handful of desktop apps that have been reworked to have a scalable UI for mobile.
Generally things are still sluggish and battery life is not great yet, which is to be expected since no mobile devices really existed out in the wild for raw Linux until very recently. Now that they do exist, things are improving rapidly. For example: a month ago battery life was atrocious. Today it's merely bad (compared to what you're used to on iOS/Android)
So what does this feel like in terms of real world usage?
1) Want to use it to place/receive phone calls/text messages... it will work, to a degree... some/most (depending on distro) of the time.
2) Want to run a web server or open a terminal and ssh over to a server... pretty flawless.
3) Want to run a GUI app designed for or adapted to mobile... the list is growing weekly, if not daily.
4) Want to run a GUI app designed for desktops (i.e. no work has been done to adapt for mobile)... prepare to be disappointed, if you can use it at all.
5) Want to run your favorite iOS app? No.
6) Want to run your favorite Android app? If it's open source, probably will be possible soon-ish. Proprietary apps? Probably not if they rely on proprietary Android/Google services.
How is the battery life? On UBPorts a few weeks ago I got about 8 hours standby, which truly is atrocious. I would probably switch to it being my daily driver if I can get 3 days standby on a distro.
A huge recent improvement is support for Crust firmware (https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust) which should get you 12-40 hours of standby (the low end is with wifi and cellular on, the high end is with them turned off. A day to a day and a half is the best I'm seeing) That just happened in the past month on most distros. Even with that installed and enabled, there is still significant room for improvement on power management of wifi and cellular. Mobian still has issues with things like random wakeups and not turning off the screen digitizer. I'll be very surprised if we can't see the standby time increasing to 3-7 days depending on what's enabled, but it will take time.
That was reported but I've never seen anything close to that even with all wireless turned off. This could be due to other power saving issues on Mobian... I just don't know yet.
To be clear, this when the phone is allowed to be in a sort of 'deep sleep' mode, this probably isn't representative of day-to-day use. The point remains though that more and more power management is working and things are improving quickly.
Generally things are still sluggish and battery life is not great yet, which is to be expected since no mobile devices really existed out in the wild for raw Linux until very recently. Now that they do exist, things are improving rapidly. For example: a month ago battery life was atrocious. Today it's merely bad (compared to what you're used to on iOS/Android)
So what does this feel like in terms of real world usage?
1) Want to use it to place/receive phone calls/text messages... it will work, to a degree... some/most (depending on distro) of the time.
2) Want to run a web server or open a terminal and ssh over to a server... pretty flawless.
3) Want to run a GUI app designed for or adapted to mobile... the list is growing weekly, if not daily.
4) Want to run a GUI app designed for desktops (i.e. no work has been done to adapt for mobile)... prepare to be disappointed, if you can use it at all.
5) Want to run your favorite iOS app? No.
6) Want to run your favorite Android app? If it's open source, probably will be possible soon-ish. Proprietary apps? Probably not if they rely on proprietary Android/Google services.