It used to be that almost any phone would still be completely usable 2 years after you bought it (most of the time, 3 years wasn't pushing it), so the carriers came up with the "upgrade every 24 months" scheme to sell more phones. But technology is improving faster than it used to be (and that rate is, itself, increasing), so a 2 year old phone is old. (We''ll be seeing 64 bit phones soon, and within a couple of years, all the upper-level phones will be 64 bit.) So now they want to get you to change phones every 18 months, so you don't start complaining that the $50 phone you bought 2 years ago is useless and it's their fault.
It's not, really - the increase in technology is about a 3rd or 4th order function - we've increased technology more since 1900 than in the 9,000 years of civilization (or 20,000 years, if Göbekli Tepe proves some far-out theories right) before that. By the end of this century, I think the concept of cellphones will be looked at as a cute temporary solution to communications that's as useful as corset stays are now. Moore's law has probably changed from 2 years to 6 months by now (the time it takes for the number of transistors in dense integrated circuits to double). We're actually having to take into account the fact that moving electrons behave as waves and need conductors wider than the electrons themselves - which no one thought about when the first VLSI (dense) integrated circuits were being designed. But if, by the end of the century, our communications devices are using quantum computers, a 64bit 10GHz CPU will seem like spears before we invented stone spear points - incredibly ancient and useless. And we'll be given "new every month" or even "new every week" plans. (Unless the computers are powerful enough to upgrade their own hardware on the fly, by making phones with the quantum equivalent of PLAs - hardware that can be changed by software.)
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