The PMN Mobile User Experience (MEX) conference is currently underway in London, and one of the themes of yesterday was Understanding Context, in which Christian Lindholm, apparently the 'godfather of mobile experience' according to PMN, for his pioneering interface work at Nokia and more recently Yahoo, talked about his vision for a new, contextually aware operating platform.

His central idea is that the environment, the user's community and their own behaviour could be translated into a form of 'contextual RSS' allowing the operating system to adapt the interface to suit particular conditions.

I like the idea of contextual RSS, but the central theme of his vision has inadvertently led to a rant! Read on for more...

Firstly, what is contextual RSS all about? Well, it's about the phone adapting its user interface according to the context of the situation in which it finds itself. Examples include increasing the size of on-screen fonts when the device senses it's in motion (assuming the user was walking down the street and needed greater visibility), or automatically reading out SMS rather than showing them visually when a handset is connected to an in-car handsfree kit.

Now, this sounds all very well in theory, but any time a designer says "the computer will automatically..." you should get very worried indeed! A computer does not have the same awareness of it surroundings as you; it does not have the same tolerance level as you; and it certainly doesn't have the sense to know when it's being too annoying.

This is why many in-car devices that "automatically" do things (such as speed camera detectors or SatNavs) can be so frustratingly annoying - great when they work, but you want to destroy them when they don't, as they constantly interrupt you, or do useless things you don't want them to do (i.e. they misread the context).

Instead of getting a mobile phone to try to predict what you want it to do next and do it before you ask it, surely it's much better to get the user interface right so that you, the user, can instruct the phone what to do in as simple a manner as possible?

This is why there's such excitement over the iPhone - it's not that the iPhone has stunning features (it doesn't), it's its interface, which makes all the things you need to do on a mobile phone utterly simple.

Get the interface right and you don't need to worry about complex and irritating automation, which is one thing that hopefully the iPhone will teach the entire mobile phone industry.