It turns out that, despite the various minimum hardware specifications Microsoft has ensured any devices manufacturers are looking to run Windows Phone 7 on, the OS will ship without the ability to copy and paste.
No multi-tasking and no clipboard? Sounds familiar...
It seems particularly strange to see Windows Phone 7 ramping up for release without the fairly fundamental functionality, especially considering the sheer amount of ridicule Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch lines got for not having the ability to copy and paste chunks of text until the update to iPhone OS 3.0. Indeed, so surprised were folks to learn that “clipboard operations” won’t be supported in Windows Phone 7 that tech blog Engadget went looking for confirmation from Microsoft.
Their response to the official confirmation word from Microsoft is,
“Windows Phone 7 Series will not have copy and paste functionality. There is a data detection service built into the text-handling API that will recognise phone numbers and addresses, but Microsoft says most users, including Office users, don’t really need clipboard functionality.”
If nothing else, it’s curious to see Microsoft saying that clipboard functionality is something people don’t want… We may well just be on our own here, but it’s something those of us in the office have found very useful indeed. Moreover, given the fact that it seems by now to be inevitable that Windows Phone 7 will suffer immediate comparison to Apple’s iPhone, it’s surprising to see Microsoft not angling for, at the very least, some semblance of feature parity.
Still, it could well be the case that it is something people simply don’t miss when Windows Phone 7 hits, but it seems likely that it’ll raise a bit of a fuss.
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