Alternative iPhone Lock Screen

Last year, Geoff Teehan of Teehan+Lax posted a proposal for a revision to the iPhone home screen. It is beautiful, usable, and I would kill to have it. Unfortunately, as the comments note, the iPhone memory is not sufficient to load all that information simultaneously without crashing, slowing down the phone, and/or draining battery.

So what is the compromise?

I believe that posting the badges and icons right on the main page is all that is necessary. The hallmark of Teehan’s concept was displaying previews of new emails, new facebook messages, etc. These previews only showed the first 10-ish words, however, meaning if you actually wanted to read the email, you had to go to the Mail client anyway. The proposed process:

1. Unlock iPhone using the swipe-to-unlock.
2. See you have a message.
3. Read preview of message.
4. Need more information than the first 10 words.
5. Go to mail client by pressing the Mail client icon.

I am proposing a much simpler process - there may be no preview, but the final destination remains the same (with fewer steps):

1. See you have a message on the lock screen itself.
2. Want to read it.
3. Go to mail client by swiping icon to the right.

This would involve a password-entry step if the phone is password-locked. If there are more icons than can fit on the left side, the icons will be scrollable by dragging the column of icons up and down.

I think this revision would help get people to their data, email, messages, etc. without making them jump through hoops, draining the battery, and slowing down the phone.