I never imagined mobile phone producers could be so unimaginative. As early as January, when Steve Jobs presented iPhone for the first time, all the big mobile phone producers, with LG and Samsung taking the lead, rushed to produce an iPhone killer. That is, a better, more attractive and smarter phone.

If you were to analyze the models deafeningly announced as iPhone killers, like LG Voyager, the older LG Prada, Samsung F700 or HTC Touch, you would unfortunately see what the leading mobile phone makers have understood from the success of the iPhone.

The recipe that appears to be en vogue for creating an iPhone killer is something along the lines of: take a touch screen, preferably larger than that of the iPhone (which is no great trouble considering that both Samsung and LG are reputed for their solutions in this category), perhaps combine it with a QWERTY keyboard (as is the case for LG Voyager), add a photo camera and the mandatory MP3 player, and as much memory space as possible.

Once the product is final, search for an operator to distribute it and serve/launch with slogans as pretentious as possible, like the one created by Verizon Wireless's chief marketing officer Mike Lanman: “LG Voyager ….will kill the iPhone.”

The obligatory condition for following this recipe is to have enough money to lose at your disposal, because a product that attempts to imitate another one will never outsell its muse or be more popular than it.

As the iPhone has been on the market since June and more than 1 million copies have been sold, personally, I recommend to those that embark on the iPhone killer mission to buy one and study it and identify its weaknesses.

Only after this are they to launch a mobile phone, perhaps even bearing the name Killer, that will take advantage of every error Apple made. This is quite difficult to achieve, as Apple’s secret does not reside in its hardware components.

After all, the iPhone offers nothing that has not been invented already: touch screen, motion sensors, MP3 player. What Apple added was this magical ingredient called Mac OS X, by way of which clients have access to all sorts of features and programs.

Therefore the next iPhone killer had better come prepared with software at least as good as the iPhone’s. Otherwise, it will have the same fate tens of MP3 players have had before the iPod - another one will bite the dust.