I watched Engadget’s video of the Prada phone with great interest, especially with the compliments about the user interface. The user interface is built in Flash, and operable with a finger.
The UI is as beautiful as you would expect with Prada branding. There are some niceties, like the ability to move the clock on the standby screen just by dragging it. Changing the clock’s time has a fun UI. Of course the entire UI is skinnable. When you enter a screen, a subtle animation of title and sometimes icons adds visual appeal and a feeling of quality. All very nice, all reinforcing the emotional experience.
It looks like these niceties are the extent of the focus on details necessary for a good user experience. The phone menu system matches that of almost any scroll-and-select device such as Nokia Series 40 and Motorola RAZR, even where it doesn’t make sense. They don’t make use of their nice touch screen, and rely basically on softkeys. Even the music player does not have all of the controls touch-enabled.
Where they had to develop something new, they did fairly well. The camera user interface looks likely to be good, though I haven’t used it. It projects translucent buttons on top of the viewfinder.
I suspect that as people use the device over a long period of time, they will become less and less enamored with it based on the little sources of friction included in the UI.