After seeing Ben Brook’s tweet linking to David Spark’s post “Six Mostly Irrelevant iOS Changes that Make Me Smile”, I decided to share one of MY favourite minor changes in iOS 5.

When sending text messages in iOS 4, you’d often be faced with the half message/half keyboard screen.

This screen was useful when you were writing a message (obviously), but annoying when you wanted to read one. 

In iOS 4 you had to tap the “Messages” box in the top left corner of the screen to bring you back to your messages index page. Then, you’d tap back on the conversation you wanted to read to view the message in full screen.

With iOS 5, you can simply tap in the middle of the message area (when you’re in the half message/half keyboard screen), and slide down to reveal the full screen view.

Tapping here (excuse my horrendous pointer graphic) and sliding downwards:

reveals the full message view:

Subtle, but an awesome tweak for people that send a lot of text messages (people will be using this app even more now with the launch of iMessage).