Worse connectivity than the first cell phones from the 90s, worse applications than the first feature phones from the early 2000s, worse performance than the first smartphones from the late 2000s.
As of today there is nothing really redeeming about it. Sure, some tech enthusiast can hack together a GTK application that shows his FOSS conference's schedule, but that's like having a spork in the middle of the amazon forest.
Does pinephones perhaps have some scheduling issues? That’s the only thing I can think of, it either has way too many processes and/or the switching is way too frequent. But linux itself manages it quite well in my experience even on low-end devices so I honestly don’t know.
EDIT: I assume parent does as well, but I definitely meant the non-pro pinephone here. I don’t have the pro one, but that presumably performs better.
Honestly, try browsing the web for a few minutes and it gets uncomfortably hot. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if some devices (mine included) have buggy hardware more so than the one you got, because I would expect much worse overall opinions otherwise.
And arm is not a new compilation target, so I don’t buy software differences being entirely the culprit, either. Worse battery life? Sure, that would explain it. But having trouble running a terminal and opening settings in 45 seconds is just criminal.
I really haven't had that experience in quite a while. I am mostly running DanctNIX or postmarketOS 22.06 with Phosh and browse with Firefox (with uBlock Origin - I also have a second Firefox profile that has NoScript installed for sites that just have too much janky JavaScript) or Epiphany.
It may help that the south of Germany is not super hot (just hot) and that I use Biktorgj's Modem firmware.
Edit, example: I am writing this in Firefox on postmarketOS while having 4 other tabs open and also two more apps (Tootle and Secrets), and the phone isn't even slightly warm.
Same thing for early PDAs like Symbian and WinCE devices - all software running on those would be native. Well, WinCE got .NET at some point, and it was usable, but that one is fully JIT-compiled.