[Kye]

A growing number of people only have a smartphone. This is probably alien to most people here, but I've had more than a few friends who haven't owned a laptop or tower in years, if they ever did. It's only recently that you could even connect a USB mass storage device to most phones to do an offline backup. I'm not sure apps for that even exist.

[ChuckNorris89]

>A growing number of people only have a smartphone.

Yes, so do I and everyone else, but that's why most people pay for cloud backup services (iCloud, etc) or set up their own if they're tech savvy enough. So when they break their phone, their data is still safe.

Still, this has nothing to do with theft. You can easily drop your phone on the ground or have it fall in the ocean on vacation. If your phone is such a valuable tool to you that you can't live without then it's up to you to get various insurance policies (phone insurance, a backup phone, etc.)

[alexvoda]

You could connect mass storage to an Android Phone for a very very long time if not from the start. Certainly from the beginning if you consider SD cards to be mass storage.

And you could physically connect mass storage to an iPhone since before the iPhone (iPod days, same connector, same adapter) but unless it was jailbroken you could do almost nothing with it

[skinnymuch]

Cloud backups work if you have one device