What's Coming in the New iPhone

Founder of social news site Digg and random Apple rumor courier Kevin Rose claims to have a handful of details on what Apple will announce in its iPhone OS 3.0 unveiling tomorrow. Among Rose's mentionable tidbits is that copy and paste should finally arrive, and he even offered a believable explanation, a clip of which is embedded below, of how the feature will work.

Rose explains that, in iPhone OS 3.0, double-tapping a word will display a magnifying-glass-like icon that contains two draggable quotation marks. Drag the marks around the word or chunk of text you want to copy, and a contextual menu will appear, offering options to copy or paste. This sounds fairly plausible, and at least as good of a UI implementation as any of the previous mockups of how this feature could work. It is worth noting that Rose has a pretty good Apple rumor track record, nailing some announcements like the 4G iPod nano, the original iPhone, and iTunes 8. The full Diggnation episode (number 194), recorded live at SXSW this past weekend, is not yet up on the Revision3 Diggnation site. You will have to deal with the brief clips for now. Unfortunately, Rose does not get into specifics of just how far this copy and paste functionality will reach.

Google's Android smartphone OS, for example, only allows the feature to shuffle around words in text boxes. Will iPhone OS 3.0 allow users to copy text from a webpage and paste it into an e-mail or a text box on the page for posting to forums? What about more ad-hoc behavior, such as copying details from a profile in the Facebook app for pasting into the iPhone's internal Address Book?

If Rose is right that copy and paste is indeed coming, these questions will hopefully be answered tomorrow at Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 media sneak peek. Ars will cover the event live from Apple's Town Hall, so stay tuned.

by David Chartier for ArsTechnica