Though if you just want a phone for calling, you can get a dumbphone. I have that and it beats any smartphone anytime, including pinephone. "Charge and forget about for a month" is an unbeatable feature for people who don't call much or receive many calls.
I also developed a routing configuration for pinephone audio https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/audio-pp.html#toc-voice-call... that will eventually make this a very fascinating device and allow features (https://xnux.eu/ui/voice-calls-app.html) that no iPhone or Android will ever give you. So PinePhone has a potential to be a much more interesting phone device.
How is the pinephone software development coordinated and how did you get into it?
And there are distribution/userspace efforts which I don't have much insight into, because I'm more focussed on the Linux kernel side of things. But from the edges it looks like a fairly small group of people pushing things forward.
I got originally interested in Linux kernel programming through various Xunlong Orange Pi boards (probably since Linux 4.6 times), Allwinner tablets, etc. I spent some years on it, and got to know a good bunch of Allwinner SoCs, and Linux driver development quite well. So when PinePhone got announced with Allwinner A64 in it, I was immediately interested. Pine64 community founder then offered me the developer unit, after noticing my interest. That was the start of it. ;)
Everybody test various things : youtube, browser, camera, consoles, various OS'es, etc.
But does this pinephone can actually make phone calls (and receive phone calls) in a reliable way ? That's the only thing that prevents me from buying one.
(if you look on the web, you'll find a handful of comments about actually receiving phone calls and they are worrying at best)