Microsoft Confirm Copy & Paste In Windows Phone 7 Is Coming

With the furore over copy & paste on Windows Phone 7 – or the lack of it – you'd think smartphone users spend their days constantly transferring snippets of text from one app to the other.  Still, Microsoft have confirmed that the functionality isn't going to be MIA forever, and that in fact its absence in the first release of the platform is more one of timing than anything else.

According to istartedsomething's conversations at MIX10 this week, the developers behind Windows Phone 7 already know exactly how they'll be implementing copy & paste in the platform, it just won't be ready for the first batch of devices.  The timescale for WP7's roll-out is already fixed, and there simply isn't room to accommodate such a cross-platform feature being added without pushing back the release schedule.

So, expect copy & paste to appear in an update sometime after the first phones arrive, along with much fanfare.  In the meantime, Microsoft are pointing to their heavy use of cross-app integration as a reason why the omission won't actually be too troublesome: for instance, addresses and numbers are automatically identified and linked to Bing Maps or the phone app, meaning there's actually less need for grabbing chunks of text and pasting them into different places.