Less simplicity [Comms]

Device and gadget makers often have to make design compromises when packing huge amounts of functionality into a single product. We are familiar with the ´brick´ Swiss Army knife type gadget, as well as the dedicated, optimised specific device. A related question is feature-creep and the tendency of engineers and designers to succumb to it. There are many reasons why some products don´t succeed. A major one which is occuring more and more is that the device is too complex for anyone other than an over-enthusiastic geek or early adopter user community to use. Complexity is influenced by many factors. One of these is how simple the feature set of the device is.