Wow. A new patent application for iPhone during Christmas holiday! The new patent called Swipe Gestures for Touch Screen Keyboards and creditted to Wayne Westerman. Seems it's very useful additions to the iPhone's on screen keyboard. But MacRumors says that Westerman multi-touch patent applications "always seem to be more ambitious than practical".

Swipe down = return

For example, erasing and basic punctuation insertion, directional swipes (also referred to herein as "swipe gestures") over the alphabetic keys can be used as an alternative to striking certain keys. Because the Space and Backspace keys are quite frequently used, they are logical candidates for the rightward and leftward swipes, respectively. Leftward and rightward swipes intuitively match the cursor travel caused by these symbols. Following this cursor movement analogy, the Enter/Return may be invoked by a downward swipe, and a Shift/Caps may be invoked by an upward swipe. Alternatively, as the Enter and Shift functions may be less frequently invoked, these may be substituted for other functions as well. One alternative mapping for the upward swipe, for example, could be to activate an alternative numeric and punctuation keypad or a particular punctuation symbol like an apostrophe or period.

Swipe left = delete

Unfortunately, there’s still no copy-and-paste function.