What’s there to innovate, really? That ship has sailed back in the ‘90’s.
Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericksson and a bunch of other companies put out a ton of really neat phones. Tech moved so fast, every six months you’d see new leaps: introducing a color screen, Bluetooth, new ringtone formats, WAP, installable apps, etc.
These days we’ve pretty much settled on boring rectangular slabs. Innovation means yet another camera, a .01 mm thinner phone, a faster screen… none of it really exciting.
We all need phones. And yes, iPhones just work. There’s nothing wrong with buying a thing that just works. I don’t need my toaster to ‘innovate’ either - just to make toast predictably, you know?