Dennis Nally used to travel with a cell phone, an electronic organizer and a laptop. These days, the U.S. PricewaterhouseCoopers chairman carries a tiny handheld device that does it all.
His Blackberry, the latest model from Canada's Research in Motion, combines a phone with an organizer that can send and receive email — just one example of new devices that combine the function of several products.
Apple's popular iPod is no longer just a portable music player, as consumers have started to use it as a back-up hard drive, a radio transmitter and a voice recorder.
Gadget makers are packing more features and functions into their devices. But evidence suggests some consumers are longing for the days when a phone was just a phone.
But can it make toast?
All cell phone makers now have models with built-in video recorders, digital cameras, music players, organizers and games. Portable CD players can be equipped to play games.
It does not stop in your pocket, either. Sony made a big splash late last year with its $940 PSX, which combines a big hard-drive for recording TV shows and a DVD burner to store them. It has a PlayStation video games console to boot.
While Apple and RIM have won praise for their easy-to-use devices, other "converged products" are trying the patience of consumers.
For example, many functions on a cell phone are wasted on the average person, said Gartner Dataquest analyst Ben Wood.
"A mobile phone can be anything you want it to be: a media player, an organizer, a healthcare product to monitor your heart, a security tool to track your children. But many people are still overwhelmed just by having a mobile phone."
Research firm Yankee Group found that 30 percent of all recently introduced home networking products sold today were returned because the consumer could not get them to work.
Philips Chief Executive Gerard Kleisterlee, in a recent speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, complained that 48 percent of potential digital camera owners were delaying their purchase because they perceived the products as too complicated.
"If a product requires a manual, maybe it's too complex," Kleisterlee said. Consumers who tried out Philips' first home entertainment box have also had problems hooking it up.
Too complex, too soon
Researchers who specialize in user interfaces are not surprised that consumers fail to operate many of the multifunctional products.
"Here on my desk I have 3Com's Ergo (a digital chalkboard and Web browser for the kitchen), which offered so many different options that people got lost in it," says Richard Harper, a researcher of user interfaces of digital products at The Appliance Studio in London.
"The majority of consumers are too sensible, time-conscious and rational to put up with hybrid products," he adds.
Mobile phone operators say consumers only use 10 percent of the possibilities of fairly simple mobile phones, and never visit wireless Internet pages or use predictive text input, record voice tags, or program fast menu buttons.
"On a recent weekend trip, my daughter brought a cell phone, an MP3 player and a digital camera. I told her she can have everything in one device. We really need to educate consumers," says Carl-Henric Svanberg, Chief Executive of Sweden's mobile phone to network maker Ericsson.
That is exactly what French mobile carrier Orange has begun to do. It is teaching subscribers how to use the wireless Internet and messaging services on a phone, clocking up 2.5 million in-store training sessions by December.
Ironically, it is the complexity of new products that is attracting electronics companies. Japanese and European consumer electronics leaders hope that low-cost Chinese manufacturers will have a hard time copying the converged devices.
Sony and Philips are among the first to have recognized that their converged products will need to become a lot easier to use. Both are looking at Apple as a company that has made it simple for consumers to buy songs on its iTunes music store on the Internet, store them on an iPod or burn them on a CD.
With the latest version of its iLife software, Apple is now trying to do the same with video and still camera, offering simple software to shoot video, edit it, add background music and burn it on a DVD disk.
Oren Ziv, Apple's European director of software product marketing, says: "The average consumer only sees gadgets being rammed down his throat. But when he shoots video he should already be thinking about sending the edited film burned on a DVD to friends and relatives. It has to be simple."