A new survey of 15,000 "faulty" wireless devices returned to UK provider WDSGlobal found that 63 percent of them weren't broken at all...their users just couldn't figure out how to use them. The combination of features, the crummy interfaces, and the lack of documentation provdied by most phones seems to be the trouble. And it's not just annoying...the survey estimates that the global cost of dealing with non-broken "broken" phones is somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.5 BILLION dollars!

While these findings seem surprising at first, if you think about them, they're really not...how many of us use more than the most basic features of our cellphones? How much more money could carriers generate if they actually made it easy for users to utilize the fancy data services found in most phones? Why can't a single cellphone manufacturer write a decent user's manual? Why does the experience suck so bad?

Nobody seems to have an answer yet, but I'd be there's gold in them there hills if someone could figure out how to make mobile data services as easy to use as an iPod.