Touching The Pain Of Sharing

All our smart and mobile platforms are about sharing content, right? Wrong! I mean, that is what they are supposed to be, but do not deliver.

Most of the time it is about as simple task as selecting a piece of text, copying it to a clipboard and pasting later somewhere else (an email message or a Twitter post). And we have to admit all the leading mobile OS platforms have it wrong. Apple did not support copy / paste at the very beginning of the iPhone era. Similarly Microsoft, with the first release of Windows Phone 7. Android (excluding the Honeycomb 3.1 and up) up till today does not provide any way to select a piece of text on a web page.

Later on, both Apple and Google have added the select / mark / copy / paste to their OSes. But this is such a pain on a touch - only device. To do it right you would have to use a pencil sharpener to sharpen your index finger. By the way text selection using a good old mouse paradigm is such a delight, especially when you have just come back from the "touch" world. This is exactly why I was so excited when my mouse, after successfully pairing with the Android tablet, displayed a cursor on the screen.

And to be honest the only mobile platform, that have had the select / mark / copy / paste right from the beginning, has been the Blackberry. Yes. The currently dying Blackberry. And this is 50% of the reason I decided to stay with the Blackberry for the time being. The other 50% is the mechanical QWERTY keyboard.