linuxmemes

Of course, everyone has different requirements on their phone, so the question if one would be comfortable running their buisness of a pine phone is quite divers.

Phone calls, texts and E-Mails

Text and E-Mails pretty much work as well as on every other phone. Phone calls work too, but the audio quality is below what one could expect from a modern iPhone.

Battery

While the battery runtime of one battery is definitely lower compared to competing devices, it is also replaceable. I usually spend my day in the office were the phone can be charged, so the battery life does not become an issue. When I am traveling I bring some extra batteries. The form factor is commonly available and batteries cost around 10 €, so I got 4 of them, which last me for ~36 hours until I have to charge them. I have so far never spend more time away from an outlet.

GPS

Works nowadays pretty reliable, accuracy of around 20 m is also good enough to find were I need to go

Bluetooth

Definitely not perfect but random disconnects happen rarely. On the other side I have an headphone jack, which always works reliably

Camera

Ok, this point goes to you, the camera is not usable. When taking pictures of documents I usually have to use my tablet.

So now to the overarching question:

Do you, in all honesty, feel comfortable enough with your device that you would confidently run a business solely through it? No, I would not feel comfortable to run a business through a phone, I need a real computer for my work. If I could only use a phone I would choose the pine phone, because at least it can run all software I require for my daily work. Connected to keyboard, mouse and a monitor it could be a slow, but acceptable work machine I can certainly imagine that there are jobs, which rely more heavily on a phone. But in these cases one should have separate work and private phones anyway

The voyager PWA. Works really great and feels pretty much like a native app

Well, I don't want it to be android powered anyways. That's the entire point.

I think they use some very old and heavily modified version of the Linux kernel, so it's not the same Linux kernel we use on desktop. Then each phone manufacturer adds custom patches on top to support their hardware. GNU/Linux phones also require a custom kernel, but the community is working on upstreaming those patches, so that they can run mainline kernel some day (PinePhone Pro and Librem 5 probably already can now, but some stuff might not work).

Yeah, using the name Linux for both the kernel and the operating system makes no sense and it's super confusing. When people say Linux when talking about the operating system, they almost always mean GNU/Linux (like Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But then there is Alpine Linux, which isn't GNU/Linux and that makes things even more confusing. If I didn't know what Alpine Linux or Arch Linux was (and had no knowledge of distro names), based on their name I would assume they are some kind of fork of the Linux kernel. Arch Linux should have really been called Arch GNU/Linux and Alpine Linux should have just been called Alpine OS.