Just me or do speakers in cell phones sound harsh?

Lirpa Labs is working on one.
Judging by the specks it should sound great.

# Channels= 1/2
Slew rate= 4 V/minute
power = .01 watts into 100 ohms.
Number of inputs = 0
Number of outputs = 3
IM distortion = greater the 100db
Dynamic headroom = -25db
freq. responce = N/A
Weight = 999 lbs

LOL !!

that is because phones are for talking and NOT listening to music!

Cell phone audio is done completely different than what you might think. It's not just the little speaker. The audio is limited to 4 kHz and the voice or sounds you hear are not even digitally sampled A/D/A conversions. What you hear is sound synthesized by the vocoder. At the sending end your voice summarized to pitch, timbre, and phonic information and then re-synthesized at the other end based on that information. Vocoders used to be optimized for specific languages though I'm not sure that's the case anymore because so many languages are used these days. There's no regular A/D/A sampling in the same manner as is done for CDs.

I tried looking up the speaker cost of the iphone in the teardown analysis but it wasn't listed. I'm not too thrilled with the audio quality either. Always seems to take an extra little bit of effort to understand what people are saying on cell phones.

Speaking of cell phones, go to Manley Labs and check out Eve Anna's new one. What a hoot !!!!!!!!

So far, Wireless200 has given the most informative answer why cell phones suck.