crust

A huge recent improvement is support for Crust firmware (https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust) which should get you 12-40 hours of standby (the low end is with wifi and cellular on, the high end is with them turned off. A day to a day and a half is the best I'm seeing) That just happened in the past month on most distros. Even with that installed and enabled, there is still significant room for improvement on power management of wifi and cellular. Mobian still has issues with things like random wakeups and not turning off the screen digitizer. I'll be very surprised if we can't see the standby time increasing to 3-7 days depending on what's enabled, but it will take time.

The iPhone 1.0 came out in 2007 and it ran on a single core arm cpu under clocked at 412mhz and with 120MB of ram and the scrolling was butter smooth. I remember being shocked at how responsive the touch screen was compared to other smartphones at the time. The PinePhone contains an AllWinner A64 Quad Core CPU with 2GB of Ram. Sure, its a crappy 5 year old Soc but it is MUCH faster than the original iphone. I know, modern smartphones have a much higher screen resolution, but still. I mention iPhones instead of android phones because it took quite a few years for Android phones to achieve that same butter smooth experience. The perceived slowness of the PinePhone is due to layers upon layers of software used to draw simple 2D stuff to the screen. I think a really simple bare metal GUI would be better than running a full blown linux desktop