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LG and Prada have officially announced the LG KE-850 (Chocolate) Prada Phone which some are calling an iPhone killer. It features a full touchscreen and a stylish design by Prada, and has already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007. It will hit the stores in 5 European countries at the end of February and in some parts of Asia before the end of March.

Its design and touchscreen interface may challenge iPhone, but there are some things that I will be missing - it may have a smaller screen resolution (not clear yet) and it does not have WiFi (that's a no-go). Still a very nice phone.

via Engadget.

In "How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote" Mike Elgan claims that announcing iPhone in so many details 6 months before it gets to customers was a big mistake and lists 6 reasons for that.

1. Apple set expectations too high.

While the keynote and its echo throughout the media idealises the iPhone as doing every thing imaginable, actually the opposite is true:

« The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones. The problem Apple now faces because of Jobs' premature detail-oriented announcement is that of dashed expectations. When customers expect more and don't get it, they become dissatisfied.

What doesn't iPhone do? Unlike most smart phones, the iPhone doesn't have voice dialing, voice memos, 3G Internet access, Word or Excel support, one-handed operation or video recording. It can't be used as a laptop modem. The battery can't be replaced. It doesn't support removable storage. The calendar, task list and e-mail won't sync with Microsoft Outlook. ... »

Read more about this and other reasons in the article.

This confirms that Apple still has a fight to win and we can't yet tell how will it end. Whatever the result we as customers will win. And answers to questions (see "Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2007") about impact of the iPhone announcement on the mobile device market are even more interesting than the device itself.

I hope to see more [low-cost ] devices with WiFi, high resolution touch-screens and an open platform with many useful application. Something Palm or Linux based will do. Plus it needs to run Skype (which may rule out PalmOS) or another widely used VoIP service.