Funny this article comes just before the iPhone revolution which puts everything in your pocket and has swallowed the gps, radio, camera, iPod, phone and pda in one single device.
I think the iPhone gets too much credit then it deserves. I owned a smartphone with Gps, wifi, full touch screen, apps, Windows, etc years before iPhone. It was a growing market.
So I guess the relevant question there is, has the smartphone managed to overcome "feature fatigue" for all the formerly-separate devices it combines? I would say "Yes, partially," because a software interface is more flexible than a hardware one, and you can at least partly rely on a common language in your UI to guide people along. And if the user wants the clock but not the radio, they can just uninstall the radio and forget about it, instead of having to look past it every time to find the clock.
But it is a device that does everything. In the end it doesn't matter much which software module delivers the functionality. It is still a device in your pocket that does it. And even a stock iPhine today is more capable than feature phones of those days. People manage to navigate that complexity rather well, all things considered.
The complexity is modular, tactile, solution-oriented, and opt-in.
The iPhone would be unusable if it came installed with every possible app. Making apps opt-in gives users the power to decide which features they do/don't want. And apps are sold as limited tools for specific tasks, not as a rat's nest of do-everything features - like many desktop apps.
Apple could have split apps into different hardware categories, so instead of apps that used the camera you had Camera Apps as a separate category to Microphone apps. But that would have been exactly the wrong approach.
The Apple approach makes user benefits obvious and keeps the technology subservient to them, which is as it should be.
Although having said that, it's hard to imagine today's Apple making that choice and getting it right in the same ways.
The "Apple approach", once they enabled 3rd party apps, was pretty similar in this respect as the incumbent smartphones and PDAs. The app store as a one stop center, and forbidding sideloadingf, was arguably ahead.