quote:

Sunday’s headline out of the South by Southwest Interactive 2009 conference now underway in Austin, Texas, is Kevin (”Digg”) Rose’s “confirmation” that Apple (AAPL) will finally introduce a copy-and-paste function in iPhone 3.0, the update to the device’s basic operating system scheduled to be unveiled at a special event this Tuesday, March 17.

Copy and paste is one of the iPhone’s most-asked-for features. According to Rose, Apple has implemented it as a multi-step process:

You double tap on a word (or, presumably, an insertion point)
A kind of magnifying glass appears with quote marks on either side of the selection
You drag the quote marks forward or back to surround the section you want to work with
You choose one of three buttons: Copy, Paste or Cut
Rose says he was told by a “friend who has been right before” that, in general, iPhone 3.0 will offer every function that the Palm (PALM) Pre promised but the iPhone didn’t yet have.

He was also given some details about what isn’t going to be in iPhone 3.0:

• No background apps (”not this release”)
  
• No video (”it’s a technical problem”)
  
• No multimedia messaging service (MMS)

quote:

The first thing to remember about Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 3.0 special event, announced last Thursday and scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m PT), is that it has been billed as “an advance preview.”

• Copy and paste. Better two years late than never, according to multiple sources. See, for example, here and here.
  
• Push notification. So Facebook, say, could alert you when you have a new message. This was promised in June 2008, but not yet delivered.
  
• MMS — Multimedia Messaging Service. So you can forward those pictures sent to you by friends with far less sophisticated cell phones. Maybe yes, maybe no.
  
• Better mail program. Why can’t you search past messages? Read them in landscape mode? Delete then en masse?
  
• Internet sharing. For those times when your iPhone has access but your laptop doesn’t. Apple and AT&T have both said so-called “tethering” is coming real soon now.
  
• Bluetooth support. Currently available only for phone headsets. Could be expanded to support wireless keyboards, speaker systems, file exchanges, syncing etc.
  
• Flash support. So you’d see videos and dancing advertisements instead of those little blue cubes. Adobe (ADBE) says its Flash Player software is ready and waiting for Apple’s approval.
  
• Better App management. The current interface is barely capable of organizing 148 applications, never mind 28,000.
  Voice dialing and turn-by-turn directions. Quick, before iPhone users cause any more traffic accidents.
  
• Video capture. It can be done without modifying the built-in camera as iPhone Video Recorder, an application available only for jailbroken iPhones, has shown.
  
• A new browser. The current version of iPhone Safari is nearly two years old and starting to get a little long in the tooth.