Suggested iPhone Enhancements (Text/Calendar)

This is the first in a series of posts covering the enhancements we would like to see in a future iPhone software update. Breaking the list up in to multiple posts should make commenting on individual applications easier.

1. Disable the 'Send' button for space character or return-only SMS messages. In other words, trim the spaces and carriage returns from the beginning and end of the message. Disable the 'Send' button if the remaining text length is zero.
2. Add an SMS context sensitive keyboard button that when tapped brings up a user managed list of phrases such as 'See you there' or 'What time?'. Tapping on a phrase would result in the text being inserted in to the message textbox.
3. It is not easy to hide the keyboard once it is displayed on the screen. Users may want to view the full screen message history to review long conversations or after changing their minds about sending a message. To demonstrate, tap the 'SMS' icon on the home screen -> tap a conversations to load its contents (this is not necessary in some cases as the iPhone will return you to the last viewed conversation). If no conversations exist, create one by sending a message to a friend then restart the SMS application from the home screen. When viewing an existing conversation the majority of the screen will display call-outs containing individual messages. Tapping on the textbox at the bottom of the screen will present the user with the keyboard. At this point the most likely actions to hide the keyboard are pressing the home button followed by tapping SMS or tapping the 'Messages' button in the upper left and re-entering the conversation. The suggested enhancement would allow the user to tap on the conversation/content area to hide the keyboard. This behavior can be found in the Safari application when entering a URL or performing a search, the user can tap on the content area of the application to hide the form and keyboard.
4. Add a clear textbox (x) to the upper right corner of the input area. This would allow users to quickly clear text rather than having the backspace the entire message.
5. Tap message bubbles to display their sent or received time stamp. The display could appear above the bubble as with other timestamps on this screen, or in the form of a popup if the user performs a tap and hold like occurs with URLs and links in Safari.