Is it possible to make the phone keypad the primary screen instead of the home screen. My iPhone is primarily my phone, not computer and it'll help a lot if the promary screen is the keypad instead of having to navigate several steps to get to it.
While not a perfect fix, if you navigate to your phone keypad when you're done doing whatever non-phone stuff you're doing, and then either lock the phone or let it lock itself, it should come right back to the keypad when you use it again, after sliding-to-unlock.