@2ck @linmob I ordered the beta edition and was absolutely not a fan of Manjaro + KDE. Try Mobian or PostmarketOS with Phosh. Much better IMO. The screen on with power doesn't seem to be an issue. Texting and calls works with T-Mobile and AT&T. No issues with the screen turning off randomly for me. I can't comment on sim contacts as I use Nextcloud to sync mine.

@2ck @jawsh @linmob
> The contacts app doesn't pull my SIM card contacts.

Wait. Did you have a feature phone (AKA dumb phone) before this? I've come late to smartphones, only having two Android phones since 2015. And I never found how to save my contacts to the SIM card. Android doesn't seem to support it.

@2ck @jawsh @linmob SMS works for me, but I have all your other issues. I exported my contacts from another phone (or rather had done so as a backup years ago and had the file handy) and then copied it to my PinePhone with sftp or something and got my contacts added that way. (IIRC SIMs can't hold that many contacts anyway, so I don't use the SIM as my main contacts storage) I can't remember what I had to do to import them. I think install something I didn't have previously, but that might come on the phone now.
The screen/sleep stuff is *maddening*. It sleeps really fast by default with no way to increase the delay as far as I know. I also noticed the power button issue very recently. I just pressed mine 3 times before anything showed on the screen, and it wasn't off or anything.
Things are incredibly rough despite what some optimists may say. I can't use mobile data on plasma mobile, which feels pretty major.
I do actually believe things will get better. I was a pretty early adopter (UBPorts Community Edition) and stuff like hardware acceleration, 60fps fix, better FDE keyboard on pmOS, and other changes have really made it better from how it was before. It's just still not that good at all. Maybe it needs another couple years, I'm not really sure how difficult some of these remaining issues are to solve.
I keep mine plugged in at my desk and will mainly just ssh into it to run updates and then reboot it every once in a while. If I try to actually use it, I'm likely to just get mad about various things. I use an android phone without a SIM around the house for stuff like browsing away from the computer or using XMPP/Matrix and other stuff you'd typically do.
Phosh works better, but it sucks because it's brought to you by GNOME people. Basically it's bad because of intentional design decisions that will likely never change. For that reason alone I am supportive of people trying to make Plasma Mobile usable. If you were in a pinch and had no other phone, maybe boot another distro using Phosh from an SD card.
Coming from desktop GNU/Linux, you would think (or I would anyway) that differences in the DE/Compositors would be minor, but they don't even use the same software for modem stuff. If I went back to Phosh, my mobile data should work, I think.
This sounds like fragmentation, and some people might assume Plasma Mobile is doing weird stuff instead of following Phosh standards, but what I've learned over the years is that it's GNOME that never follows standards, especially in the Wayland world. It's probably good to get non-Phosh stuff working better for the future of the platform.

@2ck @jawsh The actual @plasmamobile SMS app is called Spacebar. KDE Connect SMS would be the right choice if you were to send SMS via a KDE Connect connected device, e.g. an Android smartphone.
But yes, that launcher should be hidden, as it can be confusing.