We often discuss new features that could come to popular smartphones and we’ve already started to look ahead to what the iPhone 5S or 6 will offer. We’ve been saying for some time that it would be good to see something really groundbreaking come to the iPhone and after seeing the Canopy Sensus Case we think Apple would do well to incorporate some of its features on the next iPhone.

The Canopy Sensus Case expands your smartphone experience by introducing touch technology to the rear and right side of the case and Canopy also provides a range of applications offering improvements for interfacing with your phone as well as a braille keyboard. You can see a short promotional trailer below this story and we think that some of the innovation of this case could be really usefully incorporated on the next iPhone, although of course we are not suggesting that Apple copies the ideas involved.

It’s a very clever idea though, to expand the use of your smartphone by extending the touch technology to the back and right of the case, and of course if Apple chose to use this they could perhaps integrate touch technology directly to the reverse and sides of the phone itself, rather than a case. The touch technology on the Sensus case uses touch sensors that communicate with micro-processors, sending information to the phone and it almost seems odd to think that this hasn’t been used before on actual handsets rather than just using the touch technology of the display itself.

Canopy describe the Sensus Case as an “accessory for your apps” and it works with any app that can use its multi-touch sensors but does not support core applications. The Sensus case for the iPhone 4/4S and iPhone 5 is coming in the summer, in red, white or black color options. Work is also ongoing for Sensus cases for the iPad mini and iPod touch fifth-generation and there may also be one on the way for the iPad with Retina display. iPhone Sensus cases will be priced between $59 and $99 and you can see more on these at GetSensus here.

There could be plenty of advantages in using touch technology on the next iPhone, other than just on the display. For example, there would be no need for messy fingerprints and smudges on the screen if users can scroll without using the screen and there could be improved controls for gamers by using other parts of the phone other than the display, or camera functionality using just the side of the phone. It’s certainly food for thought and may of course be something that Apple is already considering. We recently discussed the need for Apple to come up with something really interesting for its next major mobile operating system, iOS 7, but perhaps there could be big changes to the hardware too, that could really grab people’s attention?

We’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Have you ever wondered why smartphone functionality couldn’t be expanded with touch technology using more parts of the phone than the screen? Can you imagine that Apple might one day use this on a future iPhone? Let us know with your comments.