Since when did smart phones become so smart that they forgot about their heritage?

Basic functionality that I had in all my old, cheap, dumb phones seems to have been forgotten in the latest and greatest smart phones.  I’m talking my previous Windows Mobile phone and the latest Android phones.  Why do simple things get left out?  There are a few basic functions that we always had in our phones that are not available in your new smart phones, including:

Reminders
Reminders for missed TXT, Voicemail, phone calls, etc.  I always knew when someone had called or send me a text message as my phones would remind me every few minutes!  Now if you miss that important message you have to hope you glance at your phone and see a flashing light or wake up your phone to find out if there are alerts in your status bar.  Why is this?  Why has this basic functionality been removed from the gene pool?  There are applications for the Android phone available on the market that fill these gaps, but why should we have to install yet another application to do this?

T9 Dialers with contact look up
Another functional that all my previous phones had was the ability to go into my dialer and start dialing either using a direct phone number or the name of the person is wanted to talk to!  I know some of the new phones being released have this functionality, but they are custom apps provided by the manufacturers like HTC.  Why isn’t this functionality built into the base OS?

What else have you found missing?  We are compiling a list of basic functionality that is missing from the Android OS and see if we can generate enough interest that Google and the many of the other developers of the Android OS will add these basics.

Give us your feedback now! What’s missing? What’s coming in future updates that you know about?