With the rapid development of mobile devices, wired and wireless communication technologies, and network based services, people are able to access information ubiquitously using a variety of devices. At the same time, users are often overwhelmed by the complexity of interacting with different sorts of devices and services available to them. Moreover, the lack of agreements and standardisation complicates the design and deployment of adaptive services by service providers and network operators. This excessive complexity prevents novel information technologies from being quickly accepted by end users and widely adopted by service providers. In this paper we argue that a flexible and extensible framework is required to extricate different parties from the burden of this complexity. The European Union funded Simplicity research project introduces the notion of a Simplicity Device to end users. Simplicity Devices allow them to store personal profiles and preferences in a secure way and enable them to customise devices and services with minimal effort. Simplicity offers a flexible and extensible Brokerage Architecture to service providers and network operators, facilitating uniform treatment of device personalisation and service adaptation by employing policy based decision mechanism. This simple framework can be used by third party application components to acquire the necessary information for configuring and adapting themselves. Moreover, Simplicity is able to provide support for heterogeneous platforms on a wide range of devices, e.g., PCs, PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players, TV sets and smart spaces.