This reviewer doesn’t actually own the Librem 5 and is using video from somebody else. He knows a bit more about Linux than most phone reviewers, but he still gets quite a few of the details wrong.
In terms of design, it is a pretty simple design.
Simple design??? The Librem 5 contains about 1300 electronic components in its two PCBs and two M.2 cards, which is three times as many components as a normal smartphone and twice as many as the PinePhone. See: Librem 5 component list · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
The Librem 5 uses six chips in place of the normal integrated mobile SoC, It is the first phone with accessible hardware kill switches and those switches can turn off every sensor on the phone. It is the first phone with a smartcard reader, and that reader requires a separate 80MHz ARM processor to control it. It is the first phone with a replaceable WiFi/Bluetooth and cellular modem (on two M.2 cards). It has a 10 layer PCB. This is literally the most complex phone that I have ever seen.
It’s basically pretty much all plastic.
The back cover is plastic, but the frame and sides of the phone are aluminum.
In scrolling through apps, you shouldn’t see much of a difference.
Currently, the Epiphany web browser has hardware acceleration enabled, but the Phosh interface, which is based on GTK 3, doesn’t have hardware acceleration enabled, so scrolling through most apps will be noticeably slower. Hardware acceleration will be coming in the future with GTK 4. See: Frequently Asked Questions · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
The Librem 5 is running PureOS, which is a Linux-based operating system, with a desktop environment called GNOME.
The Librem 5 uses a new mobile environment created by Purism which is called Phosh. It is based on GTK 3 and uses GNOME libraries and many GNOME apps, but it is not the same as the GNOME desktop environment. See: Frequently Asked Questions · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
It is incredibly light-weight compared to those other operating systems, which means that the phone should run as good as new a few years down the line, which is always a nice thing compared to Android phones, which seem to get quite slow over time.
iOS probably consumes fewer CPU cycles and less RAM than PureOS/Phosh (although it is hard to measure this since iOS and Linux don’t run on the same devices). Standard Android consumes more CPU cycles, and certainly more RAM than PureOS/Phosh, but the Android Go Edition is designed for phones with 0.5 to 1 GB of RAM and 8 to 16 GB of Flash memory storage, so low-end Android phones are probably lighter weight than PureOS/Phosh. See: Android Go: What is it and which phones run it?
You are misunderstanding the problem with updating Android. Google issues monthly security updates for Android. The problem is that the phone OEMs and the cellular providers (like Verizon) often don’t make those updates available to users. Android phones are generally only supported for 2 to 3 years by the phone OEMs, and they have no obligation to offer upgrades to newer versions of Android. The component makers (like Qualcomm and MediaTek) often stop offering firmware and drivers upgrades after 1.5 - 2.5 years, so it often isn’t possible to upgrade the kernel to a newer version. Google’s compatibility tests for Android upgrades also often make it impossible to upgrade Android phones, even if the OEM wants to offer upgrades.
In contrast, the Librem 5 is the first phone to promise lifetime software updates and the Purism developers are working to get the hardware fully supported in mainline Linux, so the Librem 5 will always be able to upgrade to the latest Linux kernel. Phosh is designed to be easily upgradeable because it is compatible with standard desktop GTK/GNOME. See: Frequently Asked Questions · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
The biggest problem is the lack of an app ecosystem, so on iOS and Android you have an app to do anything that you want to do; whereas on the Linux operating systems, there just isn’t that selection. I’d say that the main reason for this is that at the end of the day the developers of apps just want to make money, and the most popular way to do that is by collecting user data and selling it to advertisers…
I agree that this is a problem for Linux devices, but it is worth noting that there are thousands of GTK and Qt desktop applications that can be adapted to run in Linux mobile devices by adding libhandy or Kirigami classes to the code. Linux doesn’t need the same financial incentives for app developers like iOS and Android, because there is far less software development from scratch and mobile Linux application developers are encouraged to reuse and share code. See: Frequently Asked Questions · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab