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Probably because smartphones are now less about "phone" and more about "communicator". A phone that can only make calls is rightly seen as a huge anachronism. I daresay that I use my smart"phone" more for the applications I can run on it than making calls nowadays.

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But that's the point - people complain that things are getting too complex, that they don't work all the time, and that they wish companies would focus on getting the basics right. But then they go out and but the latest products because the brilliant new features instead.

You're missing the point entirely.

You don't need to abandon a decade's worth of advances to ask that, for example, the Google IME team all get on the same page (Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese IMEs all work slightly differently and appear different) before implementing say... face unlock.

I'm a big fan of single-purpose tools, but if you tried to have EVERYTHING in your life a single purpose tool, you'd need a shopping trolly to carry it all around with you.

I'm not missing the point at all. Companies are run for profit, and they make their decisions on what they believe the market wants.

Do you think that the average punter is more likely to buy their next phone based on new feature like face unlock or because they've fixed an occasional bug in mail sync?

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