True, but a smartphone has become a component of participation in society. No one buys landline telephones anymore, but they were a part of a typical family budget in the 50s.
I thought so too and then bought a cheap motorla android phone (it was more than $50, i think more like $100+) and it was absolutely much worse than a 2010-vintage iphone 4 (or the highest end android you could get in 2010).
The CPU is faster and it has more RAM but somehow the user experience is absolutely atrocious - it was not even fast enough to be able to reliably answer calls (the UI was stuttery and it took multiple seconds to unlock the screen, which by then the call went to voicemail).
It would constantly fail to do every days tasks (apps would freeze and crash, including the built-in apps) and would slow down randomly making it barely usable.
