Also another thing I should add is that not all nano-SIMs fail to work with it, some nano-SIMs will - but I have a particularly evil carrier and they likely did some trickery to make my nano-SIM not work with it. We shall have to wait to see if they can provide a compatible SIM card. I also apologize for the late reply, the demands on my time have been crazy lately.

They are going to be shipping soon. They got an order backlog because of a pile-up of orders around the holiday season. I think you can still place an order, and if so that should guarantee that yours will be closer to the front of the line when they start shipping again. If you want to use the PinePhone daily, you are in for a bumpy ride. It apparently has an issue where the phone goes into deep-sleep mode and misses incoming calls (it will light up the screen and do nothing else.) The fix available is a small program that simply prevents deep sleep, which is bad because your battery gets eaten up pretty quickly without it. Another problem is battery life; I've taken to bringing a portable battery pack with me at all times because the firmware available is a full desktop OS and eats the battery like crazy. Also, I wasn't even able to evaluate the phone part of it because my nano-SIM doesn't work with it - it uses a micro-SIM so make sure you can get one of those from your carrier first. Insofar as the version of the PinePhone is concerned, it doesn't really matter which version you get. You can flash your own firmware pretty easily, and if you're not in the position to use "dd" or a similar tool you just shouldn't own one. You need to know the basic fundamentals of Linux to be able to use it, in my humble opinion. I'm willing to help, though.

Yes. It has DIP switches on the back allowing you to physically disconnect the circuits for the front camera, microphone, WLAN/Cell carrier, etc. The firmware is ridiculously not ready for user use however. I have evaluated most of them, and none of them appear ready to replace your Android/iOS device. Sailfish: The camera doesn't work. Ubuntu: It resets for no reason. Mobian: It works, but be prepared to wait very long times for things to load as they are full featured desktop applications. Auto screen rotation doesn't work, either. It's a very cool device, but you can't really use it daily (yet.)