No at some point they become uselessly slow or won't receive necessary updates. Like even some dumb chat app requires a ton of resources. And I've also had an iPhone that worked just fine until there was an update. After that it wasn't practical to use any more and I switched back to android.

I've had 4. And I've used each one until it was completely useless.

I bought 2 of those 4 for my work. I do vr/ar and some clients require ar on the phone or tablet. And I needed one of them when I had an Airbnb, because you need the app for that. The again you can replace that with android running on a pi or sum.

Truth be told I have a Motorola Droid running Android 1 and if all you need is a phone with some email and sms texting it works fantastic. Even has a physical keyboard.

That depends on what you want out of them. If you want to minimize the amount of stuff you're carrying around as your top priority, sure, phones are great. But if you want ease of use for a specific task without unwanted interference? They're not always the best.

Like, if I were doing any sort of meaningful photography, I'd want my actual camera. It's easier to shoot with, it allows for more control, and no notifications or phone calls are going to suddenly interrupt a shot.

When it comes to a music player, it's mostly good, but what if I want to keep listening to music while doing other stuff on my phone, or while talking to someone? Phones are pretty bad at that sort of multitasking. There are certain websites I can't read while listening to spotify, because something completely inaudible takes over the sound channel as soon as I load the page.

As to making phone calls? The number of dropped calls or calls with one-way audio is absolutely absurd, and not something I ever ran into on older dumb phones.

Convenience ultimately depends on use case. It is nice to always have some kind of camera on me, even if it's kind of a half assed one. Ditto to a computer, a music player, and a phone. But they're definitely not more convenient to use.

There's a reason dials, macropads, tablets, midi devices, and things like that are popular. It's usually a lot easier to control physical stuff sitting in front of you than it is to interface with some abstracted UI. Like, typing is so bad on phones that it spurred the creation of contemporary AI.