Ocean Observations brings us a couple concepts on how they’d improve the iPhone Home Screen (Springboard). The first, above, embeds a tiny CoverFlow for apps at the bottom of the screen. While interesting, since Springboard currently supports only portrait mode and icon view, as TiPb’s asked for before, why not let it rotate to landscape for full-screen coverflow?

Next video concept, and another idea from Tog after the break!

Expose is awesome on the Mac, especially in Snow Leopard, but do we want it on our iPhone? The above proof-of-concept video offers a take on how it could look and work. Unfortunately, at that small size, are the tiny Home Screens discoverable? Would it work better if, instead of the Home Screens, it was a set of user-enabled background apps that were shown via Expose?

For both, holding down the Home button to launch would, of course, require giving up the current Voice Control activation, unless more complex controls like tap, tap, hold were introduced and weren’t too user hostile.

Meanwhile, Human Interface Guideline legend Tog offers his own opinion on what the iPhone home page system (called Springboard) needs to do to handle 180+ apps. His suggestions, pictured above, include labeled pages, vertical as well as horizontal scrolling, user-controlled icon positioning (i.e. the ability to leave empty slots), the ability to rename apps, containers (folders), aliases (so you can have the same app in multiple containers), and tags (which he says Apple is already working on).

Take a look at the video and check out Tog’s post, and let us know what you think.

[Via MobileCrunch and Daring Fireball, thanks Matthew for the tip!]