First of all, thanks for the great review. I've spent some time with Electroneum myself and have a few thoughts as well. My perspective is that their primary marketing vector is the inherent privacy / anonymity of being a CryptoNote based coin combined with a viable mobile app. All others (with the recent exception of Verge) are seriously challenged on the mobile client side.

That being said, this really is a near perfect example of the power of marketing! If you do some digging, you will see that even the mobile mining isn't actual mining!!! It's a "mining experience" -- Like the Epcot version of mining, you run the mobile app and they feed you some coins generated by an actual mining pool located who knows where. My (unconfirmed) suspicion is that they are sucking sellable data out of your phone all the while.

As a technologist, there's not a lot here. But as reformed technologist who painfully learned the value of marketing, I expect that it will do better than perhaps it should. So yes, I threw a bit of money in during the earliest pre-sale.