Best phone I ever had was an iPhone 3G running iOS 3. That was pretty much the pinnacle of usability. Compared to my wife's hot-shit 5S, it didn't have:

- a magic-ass fingerprint sensor not quite as good as the one I disabled on my Thinkpad in 2006

- a selfie camera

- Facetime

- a compass

It did, however, have a maps app that would get you where you were going most of the time. Sure, no turn-by-turn but that's because Steve Jobs was often an ass. See also: Copy and Paste, which weren't available until this operating system.

I've used the compass on my phone twice now. You can probably guess how much the selfie camera and Facetime get used. So really, in the six intervening years between then and now, the major improvement in my life is turn-by-turn, which I had on my HTC Harrier in 2004.

I think we overestimate how badly we need our phones to be hot shit because the software bloats and bloats and bloats and bloats to the point where you need a 2GHz processor just to answer a goddamn phone call. iOS 5 was 750MB. Fuckin' iOS 7 is 3GB. Tomb Raider for the PS3 is 4. I really think we could get by with less.