Why are mobile applications so hard to use? Because mobile phones are designed by committee, with no focus on the integrated user experience.
Consider my phone, the Sanyo MM-7500 from Sprint. It is a very nice phone, with a good user experience, but only if you understand the application structure. Who designed it?- Base operating system, including menu structure and softkey paradigm: Sanyo, with significant requirements from Sprint.
- Browser: Access, with some requirements from Sprint.
- Media player: third party vendor, with influence from Sprint.
- OnDemand: Handmark
- PictureMail: Sprint, with significant restrictions from LightSurf
- Themes (uiOne): Sprint and QUALCOMM
- Java runtime (KVM): third party vendor and Sanyo
- Applications and web sites: property owners
It's no wonder they don't all work together!
This mix of responsibilities is actually better than most. Only carriers like Virgin Mobile, Sprint, and NTT DoCoMo invest in controlling the entire user experience; other carriers simply add services without any integration effort. And Sprint does not do particularly well, as written by many bloggers recently, in no small part because Sprint's decisions are frequently dominated by which potential provider makes the best promises. The user experience team is brought in after the supplier relationship and requirements have been finalized.
Device manufacturers are not much better. Decisions are made on cost and speed of implementation, and not full user experience. Some device manufacturers are unaware of softkey mapping. Most device manufacturers provide devices, not user experience. Even the Motorola RAZR is about its industrial design; trying to find the browser requires use of an unlabeled shortcut key - it is not in Verizon's RAZR menu structure at all.
Nokia, along with Palm (in its past) and Apple, control the entire user experience. They control the hardware, the operating system, and the software. In Nokia's case, they ensure that the KVM is the same across devices within a Series, ensuring that a Java application that runs on one will run on the others and commands are mapped consistent with the Nokia Ui. They build their own browser, ensuring that the user experience complements the native user experience.
This dogged management of the entire user experience is frequently recognized only as "good software". It is not. Both Palm and Apple experimented with licensing their operating system to other manufacturers. Apple stopped its experiment almost immediately, but many companies licensed the Palm OS. The user experience on other hardware was different and typically worse: usually it was less integrated and less smooth, even if it did have better features.
Nokia's version of licensing the operating system is slightly different, through the Symbian alliance (dominated by Nokia). A non-Nokia Symbian device does not have the same attention to detail that a Nokia device does. Nokia's decisions are not always the best and most usable, but they do focus on the entire experience not just a component.