iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Cut, Copy, Paste

After two years of customer whining and pining, Apple has finally blessed the iPhone with Copy and Paste. You can grab a picture or text off a Web page and paste it into an email message, copy directions from email into Notes, paste a phone number from your address book into a text message, and so on.

Part of the problem, according to Apple, was the challenge of designing a way to select text and trigger Cut, Copy, and Paste functions—on a machine with no mouse and no menus! As on the Mac or PC, it takes three steps.

Step 1: Select the Text

Start by highlighting the text you want to cut or copy. Sounds simple, but there are two different ways to go about it:

• Double-tap method. Here's the quickest way. Double-tap the first word (or last word) that you want in the copied selection. That word is now highlighted, with blue dots at diagonal corners; drag these handles to expand the selection to include all the text you want to include. The little magnifying loupe helps you release the dot at just the right spot.

  

  Tip

  In text that you can't edit, like Web pages and incoming email, don't double-tap. Instead, hold your finger down on a word to produce the blue handles.

  In Safari, if you're zoomed out to see the whole page, holding down your finger highlights the entire block of text (a paragraph or even a whole article) instead of one word. Now you can expand the selection to include ...