The iPhone lacks copy and paste. I have previously used a Treo and a Blackberry, and copy and paste were features that I did use from time to time -- certainly not every day or even every week, but definitely every month. Sometimes I would copy text from one e-mail and paste it into another one. Sometimes I would copy information from a website, such as local rule from a court's website, and then paste it into an e-mail to a client. But on the iPhone, I can't do this yet.
It seems obvious to me that Apple will add this feature soon, but why isn't it here yet? On July 11, 2008, the day that the iPhone 3G was released, Sascha Segan from the site AppScout asked Greg Joswiak (Apple's VP of worldwide iPod and iPhone product marketing) about the missing feature and reported:
Why isn't there cut and paste? Apple has a priority list of features, and they got as far as they could down that list with this model, Joswiak said. In other words, they don't have anything against cut and paste. They just judged other things to be more important.
While we wait for this feature to move up Apple's priority list, some thoughtful programmers have tried to fill the gap. The first program to do so was MagicPad by Proximi. For $3.99, this app was similar to the built-in Notes app except that you could cut, copy and paste within the app. The company also released an impressive video giving Apple a proposal for how to implement these features throughout all apps on the iPhone. For a limited time during the holidays, Proximi is letting everyone download MagicPad for free. You might want to check out MagicPad while you can do so for free to get a feel for how copy and paste might work; click here to do so: 
Reader Dan Convington recently wrote to me about another attempt to fill the gap. Pastebud from programmer Jed Schmidt is not an app but instead a Javascript-powered applet that you add to your bookmarks in Safari. Once you do that and follow a few more instructions, when you are looking at a website, you can select a bookmark, causing another version of the page to open up on which you can select text to copy it, and then you can have the text pasted into a new e-mail or you can even paste the text into another webpage. It is very clever, and this YouTube video shows you how it works:
While I applaud these efforts for their ingenuity, in many ways they remind me of the first year of the iPhone when Apple did not allow third parties to develop apps but a lot of smart folks figured out how to jailbreak the iPhone and install apps anyway. It was neat that it could be done, but was really just a stopgap until Apple added the feature themselves. Now that Apple allows third party apps and developers have responded by opening up the floodgates, I just don't see any good reason for me to risk having problems on my iPhone by jailbreaking it (although, to be be fair, others disagree with me.)
You might want to try out MagicPad and Pastebud while they are free, but my hope is that it is not long before they are mere historical footnotes to the story of how Apple continuously improved the capabilities of the iPhone through software updates.
