what is the point?

[Zebulon Walton]

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..

I think I can answer this as someone who has owned a Pinephone for 5 years now and uses it only for phone calls.

I've been using cell phones since the early 1990s. (In fact I still have the same phone number I started with.) In most of that time of course smart phones did not exist. When they came out I stuck with simple flip phones. Then when 3G service was discontinued my carrier sent me a new flip phone. However despite being a "simple phone" it was festooned with Google services that I did not want. So looking at what was available that would be Google-free I chose the Pinephone. It was pretty rough at first but Mobian got to the point where it worked well enough for making and receiving calls. So I've been using the Pinephone as my daily driver for years now.

The only issue I really have is the modem sometimes gets into a funny state and needs to be rebooted. I placed an icon on my screen linked to a script to perform this function so I don't have to reboot the entire phone. (I'm running stock "002" firmware. I've thought of flashing the modem with the open-source upgrade but it's working well enough that I have not wanted to risk doing that.)

Of course battery life is not great, but normally I leave the phone off unless it needs to be used, and if possible I hook it up to external power to use it. Since the battery is removable it's easy to carry a fully charged spare.

In any event, the point of all this is that depending on one's use case the Pinephone is not pointless at all.