I haven't had any major issues with the antenna, although I've only really used it around my home Wi-Fi. It occasionally blips and I have some reconnection logic for that but overall it's been fine for indoor use. I have a DIY smart lock and DIY smart thermostat (that literally sit over the real lock and real thermostat -- I rent my apartment so I can't change those out) running off a TinyPICO each and they've been doing fine as far as the Wi-Fi connection goes. They just run a HTTP server on my LAN and I can set the lock and thermostat states with a simple REST API. (I can't stand the complexities around interfacing with Google Home and Alexa ...)
I also used a TinyPICO's BLE interface to connect a phone with a motor driver for a mini telepresence robot [0] though a TinyPICO was probably overkill for this use case. My thinking was really just future-proofing it in case I wanted to add more stuff to the robot.
BTW the Wi-Fi only seems to support 2.4 GHz. No 5Ghz.
Yeah still waiting for a new chip that has at least as much SRAM, number of cores and clock frequency as the original ESP32, but with integrated USB and 5Ghz WiFi. What Espressif have released so far are just cost-optimized variations.
Until recently, the only devkit you could find was the Seeedstudio Wio Terminal. Just came across a devboard on AliExpress for < $6. Looks interesting.
I also used a TinyPICO's BLE interface to connect a phone with a motor driver for a mini telepresence robot [0] though a TinyPICO was probably overkill for this use case. My thinking was really just future-proofing it in case I wanted to add more stuff to the robot.
BTW the Wi-Fi only seems to support 2.4 GHz. No 5Ghz.
[0] http://github.com/dheera/robot-tethys