Geographically, I am in the UK. That means most contracts do not even need to be in writing. It is simply a matter of best available evidence. When you say you are struggling to imagine a contract that is not also evidenced by email or paper, what is the difference between email and SMS? The problem is that it is the limitations of the technology that are forcing people away from SMS. Also, there are other texts not needed for tax or contractual reasons, but people may wish to keep.
Your comment about other smart phones is exactly correct. That's why I threw out Blackberry and reverted to Nokia - Blackberry, for business purposes, is only good of large businesses that have the Blackberry server to manage texts, or kids. Now it looks like Nokia have just made a serious retrograde step for anyone who wants to keep any SMS messages simply and without interference from anyone else such as Nokia or Microsoft.
The whole gist of this dicussion thread is that I am not alone in wanting a simple mechanism to save SMS texts to my PC - why does Nokia have such a big problem with that? (particularly given that it had solved the problem with Nokia Suite). I met exactly the same issue with the Blackberry I had - it didn't take long to find that many of their users have exactly the same requirement. The smartphone manufactiurers are just not listening to their customers. There is greater pressure by the likes of Microsoft to get things in the cloud, because that makes life so much easier for activities such as profiling and possible advertising. The smartphone manufacturers are part of a massive erosion of personal privacy....and don't give me a response that I don't have to use them - the point is that it is deliberate corporate activity to get access to more consumer data to improve monetization efforts.
Given the number of high profile breaches of security into systems of corporations who should have known better, having blind faith in their security mechanisms is only that - a matter of faith.
Perhaps the real problem is that the mobile phone industry is still an unregulated inustry with respect to things like privacy, security, and customer ease of access.
The bottom line is that Nokia already have working technology (Nokia Suite) that does the job, but in their infinite wisdom have chosen to replace it for the Nokia 920 with highly intrusive and much more complex Microsoft synchronization mechanisms. I understand completely that the Microsoft synchronization mechanisms will be a great benefit to many people - but there are also many who wish to retain the simplicity and greater privacy of something like Nokia Suite.
