Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can't transcribe a language you don't understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn't have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.

That's assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.

The early smartphone era was wild. Motorola made the very first phone with iTunes on it for example