Had a great conversation with Rebecca this evening about mobile UI design, off the back of Sony Ericsson’s rubbish new Android front-end that people are apparently and inexplicably fawning over. All style, no substance. It’s unquestionably going to be utterly irritating in actual day-to-day usage.

Anyway, phone manufacturers that aren’t Apple have a nightmare on their hands. Apple have moved at simply astronomical pace. It’s only been two years, but they ramped up iPhone into such a behemoth, it’s hard to know where to start in mounting competition.

Near the core, I think is this: There’s not one feature that’s a deal-_maker_ to displace the iPhone, but there are a thousand deal-breakers that would make your new handset inconsiderable.

So many things even subtly wrong would spoil the user experience we’re used to on the iPhone. There are so many things, large and small; features and subtleties, that leave a new entrant looking inadequate compared to the iPhone.

It’s a massive problem. Apple has won at producing something that’s incredibly polished from the start, and now they’re building useful new features at faster pace than other manufactures. How on earth is anyone supposed to compete with that? Palm are the only people to come close, and they did it by throwing away all their existing products.