A new survey of 15,000 worldwide mobile users from the CMO Council tells us that consumers everywhere are getting more than a little pissed about their over-powered and under-utilized phones. "Feature fatigue" is setting in. The No. 1 complaint among subscribers is that their handsets have too many functions they just don't understand. Along with that gripe is a low level of satisfaction with their retail chain, which is not knowledgeable or instructive enough about the technology.

As mobile developers, major studios, and countless start ups struggle to find just the right video forms for mobile, I have to ask myself -- why bother? Can't we just drill into the mountains of short form, small size content the Web has been generating for nearly a decade? Isn't the vault already full with entertainment content no one ever saw?

Well, in the year or so of writing this column, whining, moaning, bashing and even gushing over mobile marketing and content, nothing sparked reader feedback quite so much as last week's mention of the infamous CueCat.

I admit that I have not been a great cheerleader for mobile video. This strikes even me as strange. I was one of those mediaholic geek kids back in the day of three-network TV who had the entire prime-time grid memorized. "What's on tonight?" my parents would ask me at the dinner table. Like a scary proto-Internet kitchen appliance, I could reel off the schedule -- filtered, of course, to favor "Batman" and "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In." My parents had no idea that "Petticoat Junction" and "Marcus Welby" even made it past their first season. I owned that TV.

Longtime digerati must be smiling already at the mere mention of the infamous CueCat. For those of you new to the island, the CueCat was a handheld personal scanning device that was supposed to "inter-activate" print. By reading codes in ads, editorials and flyers, it would pop up corresponding Web pages online. The laughter commenced as soon as we saw the thing. It was a stylized cat, with the scanner at its mouth and the CueCat trademark as a kind of lower back tattoo on its butt. It's not everyday that you get computer peripherals giving you a come-hither look.

It's hard to get mobile marketers to disclose raw numbers. With all the talk about hundreds of millions of handsets out there waiting for advertisers to target, the actual response rates on some mobile campaigns can be disarmingly low. "Managing expectations" is still one of the watchwords of the industry. So when youth-oriented operator Boost Mobile and mobile community provider AirG say they garnered 1.5 million contest entries off of a mobile campaign for car customizer West Coast Customs, I had to take the bait.

The "less is more" principle seems to have been an article of faith among mobile content and advertising programmers. Back in the early days of podcasting (did I really just say "early days of podcasting?") some of the first developers used to tell me how they strained to make the shows shorter and shorter. Audiences responded so well to one and two-minute shots of content that five minutes of programming started feeling as relentlessly epic as a Peter Jackson film... or five minutes of Ellen DeGeneres' Oscar monologue.

Fair warning. Both my daughter and my girlfriend are fond of reminding me that as I get older (oh, so much older than they) I tend to get befuddled by simple things. This may explain my confused intrigue with Yahoo Go, the very promising mobile portal I poked at in my last column. Or, it may be that Yahoo has reached so far here in trying to aggregate so much onto a handset that it exposes a host of long-term issues the mobile content and marketing world haven't even begun to address.

As is its wont and tradition, Yahoo chooses the power portal approach of overwhelming you with data and options. I have been playing with their very ambitious Yahoo Go "Gamma" version on a BlackBerry for a few days now, and it is both maddening and impressive. This is as broad and deep of a mobile information app as I have seen on a phone, and (as is my wont and tradition) it raises a host of questions I can't answer yet.

Much of the mobile industry is in sunny, 60-degree Barcelona this week for 3GSM, gushing over mobile TV. Good for them. I sit here in frozen Delaware scrutinizing mobile usage numbers and squinting at all the new WAP sites and video channels these guys are announcing. Hey, someone has to do the reality check. Although I sure wish I could do it in shorts and sandals.