Arrow Keys?

Yes! I've had an iPhone since they're been on the market and this continues to irritate me. Monkeying around with the magnifying glass all the time is cumbersome IMO (often the text is positioned so you can't even see what's IN the magnifying glass). I make a lot of mistakes I guess so I'm continuously having to move my fingers away from the typing area and go back and place the cursor in between two words in the text field. It's pretty easy to be one character off when you do this. If the cursor ends up too close to the word on the right the predictive texting is defeated as you type. If you hit the Space bar when you've done this, you have to fiddle around and again move the cursor to the left. Arrow keys'd be nice, but in lieu of that a way to insert a space in-place (or push the text to right of the cursor to the right w/o moving the cursor) would really speed up typing.

I'm a pretty new user of the iPhone and the lack of arrow keys has bothered me from the beginning. It did help when I learned how to get the little magnifying glass to scroll around most windows, but to me that is still not the best way to quickly navigate through long strings of text such as an e-mail.

The case that drove me the most crazy was when I was trying to post on a google group message board. The box to type in is a fixed size within the window, and when I had gotten to the bottom it kept scrolling down to add more text (as I expected) but there was no vertical scrol bar or anything to go back up to the beginning of what I had typed. I was eventually able to get it to go up using the magnifying glass, but it was a very cumbersome process and a lot of times it seemed like I was just swiping my finger to go up on the entire page, rather than just within the text box that I was typing in.

I believe arrow keys would have been MUCH more efficient to quickly scroll up and down within the post. They wouldn't even have to be on the "main" keyboard screen with the letters.. I wouldn't care if I had to flip to a different screen such as for the letters/symbols in order to access the arrow keys, but I definitely think that Apple should include them in the next version of iOS! Consequently, after struggling to type a fairly long post on an already small keyboard, about the time I was about to submit it Safari somehow crashed on me and when I went back in everything I typed was gone anyway... so I just gave up until I got home to repost from my WINDOWS 7 PC! I think I'm going to have to check if Android has arrow keys on the keyboard... if so then that could be a deal-breaker for me next time I upgrade my phone, if Apple hasn't come to their senses by then!

place your finger in the spot you want to edit and hold it there. don't take your finger off the screen. after 1-2 seconds a circle will appear (kind of like a magnifying glass). without releasing your finger slide the line exactly where you need to edit and then release your finger. the cursor will now be in that spot and you can edit from there. Might seem awkward at first but when you get the hang of it you will find it is pretty easy to use.

No arrow keys - the iPhone includes a multi-touch screen for this only which most of the competition is copying or trying to copy.

Well since no app is allowed to be written to work as a plugin/addon to another app, no app can be made to add "arrows" to the Mail app.

Is this your first touch screen device? I've had an iPhone since first one in 2007 and never thought arrow keys were needed, though I understand every user has their own needs. Just don't see this as a high demand feature.

What I do want though is a way to get to the bottom quick. There is a shortcut to get to the top quick, but no such option to get to the bottom quick.

It would be nice to have arrow keys to help users move around an e-mail.

Do you mean to scroll up, down, left and right within the email?

If so, I find dragging my finger all around the screen to the move the email around far more intuitive and quick than pressing arrow keys would be. Plus, the keyboard takes up about half the screen, meaning less of the email would be visible at any one time to read.

DaVBMan - i have thought about this too and i think having a quick way to scroll to the middle or bottom of a long email would be useful. Kind of like the way when you are in contacts and you touch and hold the screen on the right side and the dark vertical bar appears over the alphabet and you can slide your finger up and down to quickly move to a different letter of the alphabet. I think this feature could be added to emails so when you touch the right of an email the dark bar appears and you can quickly move up and down. seems doable to me (although i am not a programmer) and would be useful for long emails.

Maybe I will get better at this over time.

You will, and you will need to since I don't think this will change anytime soon if ever.