The real issue lies with the expected core use cases, 10 years ago the primary use for PDAs/Phones was for accessing local content with the occasional syphoning of low bandwidth data for terminal access or email. Sure you could surf the web a bit and search and if you are concerned about that I'd suggest you fire up the wayback machine to remind yourself about what web content was 10 years ago. Once you closed the app or service the radios would all shut down until the next email push/pull or the user asked to go on-line. Battery life was great and idle meant idle.

That has now been flipped with the expectation that _everything_ is constantly sucked down a high bandwidth pipe. The processors and RAM in most of these modern mobile devices are primarily specified to provide an adequate web experience which today means lots of media and lots of scripting and those just eat memory.

Once this is considered it is a waste not to use that processing power in other applications so the bloat continues especially as desktop levels of performance approaches. This becomes the norm.

Then the issue of idle radios, sadly users hate waiting for the next poll cycle to let them know that a new kitten must be liked on Facebook, they want that alert _now_ so the radios can't be turned off.

18 years ago I had a PC with 8MB of RAM and a 60MHz processor, it ran Linux just fine. 14 years ago I was working on a 3G phone that was close in terms of specification and ran on a battery for days, that said the phone UI was limited and tailored for a 96x120 colour screen where as the PC would multi-task a full desktop. Neither device would be considered usable today.

I look at the devices I worked on over between 2000-2012 and the leaps in performance over the years were astonishing. The pace has not stopped since I moved on from working on mobile phones. The drive has now shifted to how close devices can get to a traditional "Desktop experience" without necessarily considering if that is the correct approach. It does make life easier for application developers migrating from PCs, they are used to vast quantities of RAM, processing power and bandwidth.

It reminds me of the adage "All software sucks" but at least there is software.

(now using a Nokia 8800 Arte since the USB port on the N9 died, guess that covers hardware reliability too...)