Rob Griffiths over at Macworld wrote about stopping the page flipping madness on the iPhone. It is a decent point. As you load more and more applications onto your iPhone the flip left/right page model starts to break down.
Above is my simple suggestion. Take the paging model familiar to users from Mobile Safari and modify it slightly. Double tapping any “home” screen on the iPhone should zoom it out and show all the pages (or up to six at a time to retain legibility, with fast scrolling if you have more pages.) Then you just tap on the page you want and it zooms back in.
I thought at first to keep it exactly like the Mobile Safari model and while the page-flipping is quicker and easier it would still be quite a bit of flipping.
Another idea would be to use a compass model. Right now if you tap the bottom right or bottom left of the iPhone home screens it flips the page left or right. Extend that. Put tap-points at each of the compass points (North, North East, East, South East, South etc.) which link off to the corresponding pages. The “home” screen would remain the center of this so you can jump back (by reversing your previous tap e.g. NW would be a reverse of SE.)
This isn’t ideal though. It limits you to seven pages and doesn’t seem as natural as the first idea.
