Paul Thurrott on Windows Phone 7 Series

While I’m currently cooking my own thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series, Paul Thurrott has actually gotten to touch it before Microsoft’s MIX10 conference. While reading his quick review (where he proclaims his love) I found him bring up the issue of it not supporting copy and paste.

There have been weird complaints this week, and you can almost feel the anti-Microsoft brigade chipping away at the patina of perfection that Microsoft has tried to erect around its new baby. The multitasking is limited. Users will only be able to get apps from the Marketplace, and not from third parties. Gasp! Is it true that there’s no copy and paste?

No matter**.** Windows Phone combines those very few things that were right about Windows Mobile–primarily some business functionality–with a much wider set of new functionality that is exciting in both scope and possibility.

While he brushes these complaints off I am reminded of Paul’s words when iPhone 1.0 didn’t have copy and paste.

And what’s up with the lack of cut/copy and paste? This is a basic OS feature that Apple included in the first Mac OS almost 25 years ago. It’s inexplicably missing from the iPhone, unavailable in any application or the wider system itself. Unreal.

So Apple gets an “Unreal” while Microsoft gets a “No Matter”, I’ll just take that as “new tech lust blinders” for the moment.

In regards to copy and paste as a feature after using most other smart phones Apple’s implementation is the one to beat.

Update: From Engadget:

Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won’t be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series.

Puts that to rest. Or not…

Update: From Long Zheng

Contrary to the controversial report out of Microsoft MIX10 this week that Windows Phone 7 Series will not feature copy & paste functionality, a person close to the den explained that copy & paste is definitely a scenario and feature that the team is putting a lot of thought about and hope to bring to the platform soon after initial release.

Ok, so it’s coming, he continues.

As it turns out, the development team actually knows exactly how they will be implementing copy & paste in WP7S but did not believe it could be implemented without affecting the release schedule they’ve committed too and therefore will be including it in an update down the road.

I’ll be interested to see it.