When Windows Phone 7 Series devices ship later this year, they'll be missing copy and paste, a feature found on most other major smartphone platforms.
Microsoft confirmed that its upcoming mobile operating system won't have any kind of clipboard for moving text around the phone, Engadget reports. The news is particularly surprising given that earlier versions of Windows Mobile already support copy and paste, and that the feature is ideal for Microsoft's Office applications.
It's possible that Microsoft will add copy and paste down the line, but the feature definitely won't appear in the first batch of devices, set to ship by the end of the year.
Windows Phone executive Todd Brix told CNet that most users don't need copy and paste. Most times this feature is used, he said, the user simply trying to copy a phone number to the dialer or e-mail an address. Windows Phone 7 Series handles these tasks differently, with a feature called "Smart Linking." When a user double clicks a phone number, they'll get an option to call it or add it to the phone's address book. When clicking on an address, the user can view it in Bing Maps.
"We tried to focus on what the core use cases were," Brix said. "Certainly there will be some people that wont be happy with some of those decisions."
From my experience on the iPhone, which was criticized for lacking copy and paste until Apple added it in an OS update, the feature is handy in more ways than Microsoft anticipates. Sometimes I'll copy the proper spelling of a word when looking it up in an online dictionary. Sometimes I copy a funny quote or article blurb and e-mail it to my friends. And sometimes I just need to shift around chunks of text when editing something I wrote.
What's really troubling here is Microsoft's blunt declaration of what people want. Copy and paste is just one feature, but if Microsoft is wrong about whether the feature is necessary, then the company will have shown that it doesn't understand the needs of its customers. That's a bigger problem than copy and paste.
