Apple Thoughts: iPhone 3.0: Copy / Paste

Answering the biggest criticism of the iPhone since its inception, Apple added Cut, Copy and Paste to the iPhone's core apps as well as the ability for developers to add it. The implementation is seriously slick. In the case of Safari (shown above) you get handles that you can drag to resize the selection areas. The selection algorithm is similar to the tap to zoom algorithm Safari already uses.

In other applications, you get two handles and just drag them apart to select text (below).

Overall, the implementation is very slick (much more than I expected, frankly) and despite the fact that I don't really care whether or not I ever get CCP, I know a lot of you out there are doing a tap dance right now in anticipation of the new software! If nothing else, this ought to silence a very good chunk of the folks who ridiculously claimed that the iPhone is not a true smart phone as it is because it doesn't have copy and paste.

We'll have more individual feature coverage of the iPhone 3.0 event as the day goes on, so stay tuned!