Honestly, a continuous connectivity model was an ambitious bet early on. Wasn't cellular data at the time basically using the phone as a 9600bps modem at astro

Honestly, a continuous connectivity model was an ambitious bet early on. Wasn't cellular data at the time basically using the phone as a 9600bps modem at astronomical per-minute prices? If continuous connectivity was unavailable, I could imagine an somewhat different ecosystem developing. We could still have sexy phone/PDA devices, but with software optimized around caching and making use of a transient connection. For example, "feed" based apps like HN/Reddit/any typical news sources tend to pull the latest feed when you open the app, then load individual articles on request. In a limited-connectivity world, you'd see the app sitting in the background, waiting for Wi-Fi or a sync cable or however it was hooked in, and then pulling as many articles as it could to a local cache, so you could read them completely without data later. I'm actually surprised this didn't happen much more in countries where data was spotty or expensive and limited.