The Pinephone is a development platform, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that Pinephone (or Librem for that matter) is anywhere near ready for daily use by most folks.
That said, when it comes to open mobile platforms, I think my assertion that the Pinephone is the most promising platform still stands -- they're the most successful at getting today's "state of the art" in open dev platforms into the hands of developers, even if that "state of the art" has a woefully out of date SoC.
US subs are often incommunicado for extended periods of time. If they receive an EAM ordering them to suface and launch immediately, guess what happens.
Because it is affordable, and more importantly, because it shipped. I'm thankful for the open source work the folks at Purism have put out, but the reality of the situation is that I can drop $800 and wait a few months on a Librem, or I can drop $150 and wait a few weeks on a Pinephone. If I splurge and spend $50 more ($200), I even end up with a Pinephone with more RAM than the Librem.
The only real wins for the Librem are aesthetics (it's pretty), an ever so slightly higher clock speed on the ARM64 cores, and a GPU that is historically better supported by open source software. The final point is of less and less concern every day now that Mali is seeing open source support.
That said, when it comes to open mobile platforms, I think my assertion that the Pinephone is the most promising platform still stands -- they're the most successful at getting today's "state of the art" in open dev platforms into the hands of developers, even if that "state of the art" has a woefully out of date SoC.