I'd have to live my life in an unsustainable state of vigilance and care to not drop things.

Heck, even when I think I'm being careful (eg carrying a very full mug or glass), I'm liable to focus on what I'm doing to the point of messing it all up due to lack of awareness (eg keeping my glass nice and still until I bump my elbow into the door frame and spill some of my drink).

It also does not seem to be improving wit age.

I drop my phone occasionally. I don't think there is much evidence that I am uniquely non-clumsy. Phones aren't that fragile, particularly these days.

Never thought of that, last time I used a taxi it was a dial phone so it has never been a consideration for decades.

I'm old enough to where I won't be forgetting any time soon how excellent things can be without any phone at all, much less cellular. Land lines were usually too expensive for students but people weren't crying about doing without.

I do bring the flatphone with me regularly, just not most of the time, and only when I have a strong anticipation of wanting or even needing it.

In a restaurant I didn't even like pagers when they were a thing.

Pagers might have been anti-social with their piercing interruptions, but least they weren't as annoying to carry around as an oversized internet-connected device.

And definitely not as anti-social as a phone having Facebook with a human being strung along attached by the finger.

It's not a matter of durability, it's basic "smartness".

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.