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One glaringly obvious thing about the iPhone is that it doesn’t have a status light or screen to let you know when something’s happened while you’ve been away from it for a while. While in the last update they helped a bit by upping the number of notifications after an SMS or voicemail from once to three times, that’s only about 10 minutes of letting you know you’ve got an important message from your mum.

Interestingly enough, Apple has put through a patent for a means of displaying icon-like status indicators on the iPhone’s displays even when the handset is locked and the backlight turned off. Advantage to this is obviously to save you having to even wake the thing up for the iPhone to let you know what you’re missing out on. Above is Giz’ rendering of what it could be like- personally I think the brightness of the icons is a bit over-optimistic, with the backlight off it’s more likely to be similar to an ebook reader screen, if that. Would still be very useful, as long as you’re not trying to check it at night.

We’ll have to wait and see whether the current technology in the iPhone 3G will support this in a firmware update, or whether it’ll be incorporated into the next generation model. Here’s hoping the former.