The lost user manual

Ok, given how complicated the average gadget is these days it's probably not surprising that most people barely get past the most basic stuff, but this past Thursday's Circuits section of the New York Times talks about how big of a problem hidden features has become. What's the deal? The proliferation of all sorts of crazy features, the fact that there can't be a button for everything (nor would you want there to be, as that would take up an absurd amount of space), and the by and large elimination of the user manual, which means that lots of features end up going undiscovered and unused (which of course creates a market for third-party manuals, which are usually better reads anyway). While some of the "lost" features they mention are things people really should have figured out (the "repeat" function on Palm's Datebook) some are actually buried pretty deep, like the backlight on certain IBM laptops. And it's not like this is a problem that plagues just casual users —
even supposed gadget experts like ourselves sometimes don't know what we're missing.