Are today's cell phones designed to break after a year or two?

I ask because my wife and I have had cell phones for about 8 years now, and I just ordered what I think is my 5th phone, my wife is on her 4th and it’s starting to fall apart as well. I understand that you carry them around with you all the time in your pocket or purse, but it seems like maybe they’d get scratched up, lose a piece of trim or have a dead battery or something minor. My last phone (the one I’m using now until my new one arrives), is a Razr, which 2+ years ago when I got it was still a pretty well sought after phone. And now about 5 different really annoying internal things have gone wrong with it, it’s not something simple like a battery or anything like that, it just makes weird noises, doesn’t display anything on the outside of the phone anymore (like I used to be able to see who was calling or what time it was w/o opening the phone, now that screen is black), quite often when I go to charge it, it freaks out and I try to unplug it after 12 hours of charging or what not, and it will say “Insert Sim”, and it won’t have even started to charge. Or some times during calls my whole OS resets, I drop the call and the screen has to reset before I can use it. It’s gotten so unbearable that even though I haven’t got a penny to spare, I paid $25 in upgrade and shipping fees to get a phone that works (never gonna find a job if I don’t have a working cell phone).

So, I was thinking about it, and I realized that as soon as my contract is up, almost invariably one or both of our phones will start acting funny, and I just don’t think that’s right. But what really got to me was when I started thinking about when we didn’t even HAVE cell phones. Some of you may be old enough to remember back when you actually didn’t even own your phones, but you paid a monthly fee to the phone company for a telephone, and they basically had two styles, the ones mounted to the wall and the ones that set on the desk. We had the same phone the whole time I was growing up and NEVER replaced it. Yet that phone was probably about as technologically advanced as a cast iron skillet….it seems the more advanced the technology gets, the less time the product holds up. And I know about technological obsolescence….I actually don’t feel the need to upgrade my technology every two years even though it’s 3 times as advanced, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But it seems they have caught on to consumers like me and basically shoved their middle fingers in the air at me and said, “well, if that’s the case, then we’ll make sure it DOES break.”

So anyone have any insight? Why is it that a simple telephone with no built in technology can last for decades, but a $300 high tech gadget goes tits up in 2 years?