Should I buy a Pinephone Pro?

[vap0rtranz]

That (1) it is not underpowered, i.e that it runs smoothly & fast and (2)(most of all) that the modem does not crash all the time.

Agree with @dukla2000 -- the modem shouldn't be crashing. Poor cell signal from modem to tower will make my modem keep searching, and in Phosph it _appears_ the modem is going on/off or cycling 3G/4G, randomly getting 4bars then 0bars -- blame that on poor UI. My modem isn't crashing. mmcli and other tools give more precise info than any UI. And someone could blame poor signal on poor antenna but in my case it's living too far from towers.

It's not always the modem's fault. But just encase, have you tried fashing to Biktorgj's FOSS firmware?

How fast does the phone need to be?

Reviewers complain a lot Allwinner A64s but ignore storage. Switching to F2FS on the eMMC is a noticeable difference in responsiveness, and the eMMC can be even faster with soldering (to change its voltage -- I've considering doing this). But I don't think any web browser will be as fast as Android/iOS anytime soon without good GPU acceleration and probably some proprietary blobs, and half of that problem is _bloated_ websites not worth our time anyways. I've been impressed with the responsiveness of native apps that are doing a lot of things -- like Pure Maps.