Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that the Sony-Ericsson smartphones from 25 years ago did not fail to advance as time marched on. By the time the iPhone was revealed the Sonys at the time made Apples look pretty dumb by comparison.
Ah, yes I do think the older generation of phones were more durable. My point was that the technology had a significant change and there's at least 2 different generations of products called "phones" in that time period and comparing them against each other on durability is not a reasonable argument
Sony had regular ordinary quick-change batteries, at least their own Memory Sticks for removable storage before they ended up settling for SD cards, plus the essential USB connection in addition to bluetooth to connect you to your PC to at least use the PC OS to handle the file management of the phone.
And there was always the PC software suite for Sony owners so you could get your PC online before there were hotspots, and you could do texting and make calls from the PC, update the phone, install phone apps from the PC, etc. You could consider the phone a peripheral of the PC, or the PC a peripheral of the phone. And integration was supposed to continue getting better from there.
Like a normal smartphone way before the iPhone appeared, which the iPhone had none of the established hallmarks of smartness, except that it was on the internet. Plus it was locked down in annoying ways never before seen.
Jobs was pretty intense with his reality distortion efforts, he got people to believe until this day that smartphones didn't exist until he had success with it. What it really was was that established smartphones were about $500 and almost nobody was going to pay that so naturally they were not flying off the shelf any more than they ever had been. It was actually widely considered pretty stupid to pay that much for a phone at the time unless you were deeply in need of those connected features.
He convinced enough people that phones had never been so "smart" since there were so few having any experience with them. But why stop there? While he was at it he got his fans to pay almost $1000 too.