Wifi keeps waking up the phone, draining the battery, then craps out when you want to use it. The camera has like 5fps with 1998 flip phone quality. Forget about multi tasking. It connects to the cell network so calling and texting should work. Want to use an app for something? Too bad.
That’s my experience from two years ago, I had the distro hopping sd card and tried all os versions at the time. It’s just not there yet.
The only use I see is dropping it somewhere and then using it as a jump host over lte, but I haven’t tested that.
I have a PinePhone Pro and if the battery would last longer than a few hours, it would totally work as a daily driver. Fast enough and can do everything I need it to do, but 3-4 hour battery life. If someone can figure that part out, I think it'll be good enough for at least early adopters.
I bought the keyboard addon with the extra battery and that has increased my og PinePhone's battery life a lot. So maybe give that a try. The downside is that it makes the phone pretty big and it might not always fit in your pocket. But it might be useful while traveling for example.
For PinePhone Pro there is also some proprietary firmware, which is supposed to help. Are you using that? I probably wouldn't want to install it, but it's supposed to increase the battery life to that of the original PinePhone.
A lot has changed in 2 years. But the camera on the original PinePhone will always be bad, since it's a 5 megapixel camera. For that reason nobody has even bothered to implement video recording, but there are scripts, which will let you do that.