The mobile phone industry has lost its sense of serving the customer, is wildly introducing unwanted features, has lost its sense of the coherence of a mobile phone’s functionality, and is abusing its customers, according to an editorial at The Register on Tuesday. The industry should be very worried about the iPhone.

There was a time when mobile phones reached a certain level of maturity as a communication device. "The 3210 is the Model T Ford of mobile phones," Brendon McLean wrote. "By 2000, the phone was cheap enough that almost anyone could afford it. Yet despite its affordability, it was packed with features not yet seen in the mass market; most of them market firsts.

"Among other things, it introduced internal aerials, T9 predictive text input, downloadable ringtones, downloadable operator logos and a user interface as easy to use as a doorbell."

Steve Jobs Introduces iPhone at Macworld 2007

However, the recent introduction of widgets on their phone is, according to the author, "further proof that the entire mobile industry is a rudderless ship furiously innovating in circles."

Worse, features the should combine gracefully to make experience coherent are oddly lacking in some new phones: "The Nokia Communicator, a phone that can check all the "cool boxes", has no vibrate. The Sony Ericsson P990, loaded with more bullet points than a US Marine, has had the much acclaimed 5-way jog dial of its predecessors tragically neutered. The Samsung X820, which has a UI fast enough to make Nokia owners weep with nostalgic despair, has no automatic keylock. The K-series Sony Ericssons, otherwise almost perfect phones, have SIM card slots designed to punish the world’s nail-biters and tragically have neglected a volume setting for message alerts.

Then there’s the ring tone game. New cell phones come equipped with only the most "hideous" ones, and the user is forced to pay for a decent one. Finally, while the HDTV industry is "hell-bent on convincing anyone who’ll listen that television can only be enjoyed on high frame-rate, 40-inch, LCD HDTVs," the mobile phone industry is taking a TV on a Post-It-Note approach.

The net result of all this customer abuse, incoherence in design and vision, is that they are opening themselves up for a serious blow from Apple. The author summed it up nicely:

"Not everyone agrees the iPhone will be as successful as Jobs hopes, but Apple does seem to make the perfect bogeyman for the mobile phone industry. What could be more scary than an organization capable of working in total secrecy, with a track record of creating highly desirable products, headed by a man who’s beaten cancer and an SEC investigation and comes equipped with a Reality Distortion Field that would make Darth Vader jealous.

"Frankly, its just what the doctor ordered for this very sick industry."