Also, I now love my blackberry much more than I ever did the iPhone. Apps I use are available (maps, yelp, foursquare, pandora), and the multitasking and the advanced features of the OS just keep surprising me. I can use my blackberry to connect to a VPN (it's built in). Coming from the iPhone, I feel like my handcuffs have just been taken off and I'm now free to use my phone the way I want to.
Android's browser uses a long tap for cut and paste, so never had this problem.
The only way to bring up that dialog accidentally is to tap on the screen, keep your finger still for more than one second and then try to start scrolling. Seems odd for anybody to try doing that.
"Now we weren't the first to this party, but we're gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste."
I think it's a fantastic idea to add Background * API if you can't provide full blown multitasking. Covers 80% of the use cases.
I'm not sure if I'm more amazed at how something as inane as this basic operation is touted as a huge feature differentiator, or that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar a year computing company, who's been in the business literally from the start, talks about it with breathless urgency like it's the second coming.
Copy/cut and paste is not a major feature, it should be buried among a list of minor enhancements. It's like the equivalent and releasing a new keyboard with a shift key on either side!
No, I'm not saying that it doesn't have certain considerations necessary to make it work well. We can't even get proper clipboard support in Ubuntu these days. So I'm not saying it's really that simple.
Yes, I am saying it's not a big feature. Again, it's like VW coming out with a new Jetta, and one of the specs they touted was "Now with tires!!!"
You are right, in a multitouch world, I have far more options for how to do this.
1) Has trouble finding optimal solutions given numerous choices?
2) Has found the most optimal solution?
1. It's unlikely that anybody has found an optimal cut+paste system for multi-touch devices.
2. The broader range of imaginable ways of implementing cut+paste means that the first solutions to market are relatively unlikely to be considered "good" once the various options have been more fully explored.
3. The large number of ways to implement cut+paste means that there will almost certainly be a significant difference in the quality/usability of different solutions. These disparities mean that the mere presence or absence of a cut+paste solution is not enough to judge whether a product does a good job of fulfilling the need for cut+paste. Simply asking whether a product has a cut+paste system is not helpful for comparing multitouch devices, because not all methods are equal, and some may be virtually unusable.
Apple is looking to establish and to extend their beachheads in both the smartphone and tablet spaces, and this is how you do that. You invest design and development and debug and test. Big-time.
Being a response of marketing and features for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and the HP Slate announcements, this looks quite potent.
And interestingly, this approach looks quite reminiscent of how Microsoft slid in a new (Windows) computing platform from up underneath its competitors way back in the 1990s, too.
It's kind of the way of the world.