what is the point?

[biketool]

Howdy.
I've come across several daily driver users who eventually state things like
Oh, I don't care about buggy wifi, slow X, crashing Y or unstable Z because I use it only for: calls, sms, contacts.
Oh, who cares about battery life, i keep it powered off most of the day etc..

my question is, what is the point of having a linux phone when use case is dumb phone features only? Why not just use some dumb nokia that runs for 7 days on a battery and call it a day? also same privacy level on those devices...

I think the cold truth is, because its too slow and unstable to do anything else then calls and sms with it, but then the loop goes back to the beginning, what is the point..

Because we are hopefully reinventing the linux-phone OS wheel for the last time and this time on hardware with our own freedom-centric design.  The Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 was sold with a debian based OS in 2000, from '03 on to 2011 Nokia was selling mini tablets and then phones running a debian based mobian OS.
The problem was they were selling good linux devices with good battery life but with NDA restricted bin blob drivers where a real kernel upgrade was impossible, but they were able to get the features of a flagship, they had a critical mass of users and most commercial online and navigation services i.e. whatsapp, sygic, and skype were available at the time either FOSS or as a closed binary package.  Hacked drivers were developed over the last 15 years to the point that most of the features were available in a nearly full FOSS way for the Nokia and earlier the Sharp devices.
The openMoko phone was similar to the Pine64 line in that it was designed with only components that were available with complete data for FOSS drivers released by the manufacturer, but there was not really critical mass beyond a few radical FOSS devs.
Now we finally, with sideloaded apks going away on android, a reason why more people will be demanding a freer phone.
In my opinion building a private phone like the graphineOS offerings are not enough, libhybris and using android driver blob releases is not enough.  Blob drivers at a minimum hold upgrades to the last binary closed driver package released by a hardware manufacturer.
The pinephone or any device with real FOSS drivers can be kept working for as long as there is dev interest in supporting said hardware.
This says nothing of the uncertainty what the dark secret software and drivers are doing behind our backs.
I have only talked aboutsoftware.
The Pine64 and Librem hardware has a FOSS booted CPU and modularizes the modem, there is no shared memory, and we have mostly hacked the closed blob software from the OS that the modem is running.  In a normal apple or android phone the modem is running a foreign hostile OS that can read the shared memory and do things within the operations of even a fully FOSS system running on the main CPU.
So that is the point of this and related projects, someday with enough critical mass of privacy and freedom seeking users we should be able to boot a FOSS system onto an open hardware(RISC-V?) design user respecting and protecting communicating and computing device and eventually get a flagship experience as good as but different than what you currently can buy in a mobile shop where you are locked into a walled garden ad you must replace hardware and software every three years while sharing your every activity with companies who want to sell that information to all bidders private and police and smother you with bespoke advertising and other infringements on your person.
A nice side benefit of the software and hardware of the Pinephone line at least is it is also immune to Cellbrite USB hacking attempts.