I bought a PinePhone to use just as an SMS gateway‡. My requirements is about as minimal as they come: it needs to stay connected to the cell network, wakeup when a new SMS comes in, and run my little gateway server that is listening for dbus messages. It often fails to do this simple task.

It seems to not do a great job of staying connected to the cell network. And it also often doesn't wakeup for new SMS messages.

I thought buying dedicated hardware that is designed to send and receive SMS would be better than buying a raspberry pi and an lte dongle, but I now regret that decision.

I've not tried to use the PhinePhone as an actual phone, but from the little time I've been forced to interact with it, the UI is basically unusable. Its incredibly slow and unresponsive. Often times it will just lock up for no apparent reason. SSH'ing into the phone has been the only reliable way of interacting with it.

‡ For the handful of services that refuse to work with Google Voice.