I know a lot of people are not happy about the size of the screen where your text message shows (myself included) I just noticed that as long as you start with your finger on the message portion of the screen, you can use the whole screen to scroll the message portion, makes it a little more tolerable for me. I've also set my left convenience key to "show virtual keyboard" to make it easier to toggle the keybaord when reading and replying to messages.
I know, but for some reason it would take me multiple swipes to make the keyboard shrink down, convenience key just seems to be easier for me. Thanks though : )