What is it with these tiny cameras?

Why do people like tiny things so much? Tiny phones, tiny dogs, tiny cameras. I hate to buy something so small that one of the dogs could easily eat it. Cell phones? Too small. I suppose the ones that fold are okay, but we have the cheapie Nokia Tracfones and I hate them. If I put the thing close enough to my mouth so that Brett can hear me, I can't hear him. I have to remember to put it back in it's little case that hangs on the wall or I'll put it down somewhere and lose it. We don't have phone lines out here so we have to have the cells, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

Which brings me to cameras. We have a seven year old Agfa ePhoto. It was cheap ($200.) It doesn't have even one megapixel. It takes crap pictures. But I've never had any problems with it. Late last year the card reader I use for it's smartmedia card died. We've tried four other readers and none of them will read the card. It works fine in the camera. I've come to the conclusion that the card is so old and so small (2 MB) that the current crop of readers can't read it. I can't get a USB cable for the camera, so it sits, collecting dust. And so in the interest of taking pictures of the dogs, we got a new camera.

This one is also cheap ($100.) It's a Fuji Finepix A500. The camera I really want hasn't shipped yet and I needed one to tide me over and after much reading of reviews, this was it. The A500 has a 3x optical zoom, which is cool, you can mess with manual settings, which is cool, it has a decent macro, which is cool, and it takes video with sound, which is also cool. It's shiny. But the thing is about four inches long. There's nowhere to grip it. Everywhere you put your fingers you cover up something you need, like the viewfinder or the zoom button. I have tiny hands and I can't hold the thing so it isn't horribly awkward to use. Stupid, stupid design. Is it really necessary to have such a tiny camera? It can fit in a pocket or any purse you care to carry with room to spare, so why so tiny? Because it's cute? Phooey. What happened to functional design? Or are we so used to compromising functionality in order to have cute, tiny things that we don't notice what a pain in the ass it is to use?