Prada's January announcement of a collaboration with LG to produce a
phone represents another attempt for phone makers to appeal to
increasingly sophisticated advanced phone users.  The phone will begin
arriving in mid March and offers touchscreen capabilities similar to
Apple's new iPhone. It is different from previous luxury branded phones
in that Prada's input was taken onboard during the internal development
of the phone.  Features like a monochromatic display, photo and video
capabilities with a good lens by German manufacturer
Schneider-Kreuznach, and interesting picture formatting displays are
all generating good buzz.

On the negative side, early reports indicate that buyers will need
to massively upgrade the memory to get any real use of the video and
photo capabilities, and sometimes the touchscreen can be a little slow
in registering your finger movements.  

The Prada phone is of course just the latest in a saga of luxury
projects in the phone sector: starting with Vertu and the concept of
luxury phones, and most recently with the rebadged RAZR by Dole &
Gabanna, which appealed only to the wrong sort of people: as the RAZR
went mass, the hip set realized that it had lost its cachet, and dumped
it quickly. Plus the interface wasn't great.  Introducing a rebadged
RAZR to appeal to them did little becaue the phone did nothing new.

It remains to be seen if people will laugh at a Prada phone owner, or
smirk in jealousy, because fashion for fashion's sake is rarely, if
ever, truly fashionable.  Unless the phone is truly better than
anything else out there, it won't be accepted, and that was the lesson
learned with the D&G RAZR.

I'm amazed it's not called iPrada

I used a prototype of one of these in Finland late last year and it was pretty buggy but a great approach.  The touch is nowhere near as advanced as the iPhone multipoint hard screen touch 'seems' to be, but it would still be worth a try except the price of the Prada phone is expected to be 600Euro, way more expensive than the iPhone.

"I spent more on my phone than you" is sort of the point there

I look down upon people with really expensive phones.

And vice versa.... So who's looking up?

I'm waiting for the OpenMoko