This makes no sense for me. Email has plenty of issues too, you can't just take any new features the smartphones have and call it a default of the old phones.

This makes no sense for me. Email has plenty of issues too, you can't just take any new features the smartphones have and call it a default of the old phones. Email is "perfect" as long as nothing better replaces it, then it will no longer be perfect? A few issues of email I can think of : no guarantee your email will arrive, and no real acknowledgement it did. Also, Mailing lists are clunky for users (I still receive regularly emails with 500 recipients, where a mailing list would be far more appropriate). I also think of attachments, which are very limited in size with a lot of providers. So email is far from perfect, it's just that nothing better has arrived yet.