"The most remarked-upon thing about mobile phones in recent years is the explosion in the number of features they contain. Even the cheapest models may have dozens of different uses, and indeed one of the biggest complaints from some people is that it's impossible to buy a phone that is just a phone any more.
But practically all of us use our phones for a little bit more than calls, we all glance at the display to see the time for example, and texting is almost universally used. So it's not a question of wanting to get rid of every non-call feature, it's simply getting rid of the features we don't use. The trouble is, different people use different features, so it's often simpler and cheaper to just include lots of features as standard."