To be fair, that was a pretty brief moment in cell phones. Yeah, I had a Nokia in the mid-late 90s that would go for days without a charge, but - We didn't ta

To be fair, that was a pretty brief moment in cell phones. Yeah, I had a Nokia in the mid-late 90s that would go for days without a charge, but - We didn't talk on them that much back then; and - The phone was just a phone. The difference as I understood it was the newer digital signal tech instead of legacy AMPS. At the same time, service costs dropped dramatically -- AT&T introduced the "OneRate" plan on the back of one of these phones, and for me personally that reduced my cell bill by like 65-75%. But the phone didn't do anything but talk. I guess we could text, but my friends & coworkers & I didn't do much texting until we got phones with keyboards after the turn of the century. Anyway, the "insane battery life" era was short (because we all went to more power-hungry PDA-type devices pretty quickly, from Palm or Blackberry on (ugh) WinMo). The Nokias got broad acceptance around 97 or so, but by 2002 we were all chasing PDAs. The other thing is that the "insane battery life" we remember is a little bit false, because we only asked those devices to make calls. Now, we get a full day's usage out of a smartphone that we're touching constantly. In real terms, we're getting more usage per charge, I suspect.