Most outdoor enthusiasts should be familiar with the sight of a spork. A spork is a cutlery born from the marriage of a spoon with a fork.

To save on weight, sporks are usually made from precious titanium either from recycled aeroplanes or tough plastics such as Lexan.

In theory, it sounds great - you hold in your hand a cutlery that serves two functions: you can use your fork to slice meat or spoon up your soup. The spork will be great when you're sitting on a log outdoors with one hand holding the spork and another, the plate. But in practice, as many outdoor enthusiasts would attest, it doesn't always work as it claims.

You see, to accommodate forked tips, the spoon would have to sacrifice some prime real estate on the outer edge which affects its soup spooning abilities. Likewise, the fork tips can't be made long or thin enough to efficiently fork food morsels, otherwise the spoon half-looses its spooning abilities completely, so a compromise has to be reached. Sounds familiar?

Even if you have never experienced the agony of spooning soup with a spork, most of us are pretty familiar with the scenario of today's multi-functional phone. Its primary role in life is as a mobile phone. Then someone decided to incorporate a camera, which can never be as powerful due to space and power constraints. Later, someone else decided to add music playback functionality, a light-emitting diode flash which also doubles up as a poor man's flashlight, a global positioning system (GPS), and the list goes on. While it sounds great in the advertisement, it can never be as good as the real deal.

Take the camera features for example. There is no aperture or shutter priority, and you can't even set the ISO sensitivity. Shutter release button isn't exactly ergonomic, either.

Then there is A-GPS, or Assisted GPS, which due to the less-than-stellar performance of the phone's overwhelmed processor, needs to get its co-ordinates from both the GSM base stations and directly from the satellites - which sounds good on paper, works great on the tele-commercials, but doesn't exactly work as advertised in Kuala Lumpur.

Unsurprisingly, manufacturers simply won't use a dedicated GPS chip due to power constraints, because the mobile phone needs to be a mobile phone first, so everything else takes a backseat.

If you are shopping for something specific, like a fork or a spoon, get either the fork or the spoon. Don't bother getting the spork!