Sure, iPhone 2.2 is getting better and better, but after 2 years and the best graphical user interface team ever put on Jobs’ vegan earth, we still don’t have official cut, copy, and paste functionality. Blackberry Storm, however, which hasn’t even hit the market yet? Looks like they’ll get it Day One.
Our frenemies over a Crackberry.com pass along the deets (via BGR), while a commenter updates on the functionality:
What it says is that you simultaneously place one finger at the beginning of the text you want to copy and one finger at the end of the text you want to copy. This will highlight the selection. You can remove your fingers at this point. If the selection isn’t exactly what you want you can touch at the beginning of the highlight and slide the highlight to where you want. Likewise for the end of the highlight. Then there are two ways to copy. First way: “click” (as in touch the screen and press) in the middle of the highlight. This brings up a menu box with the copy command. Alternatively you can press the physical menu button and select copy.
Blarg! We think our brains just vomited.
Dieter points out that this won’t work on the iPhone, as some of those gestures, like pinch, are already taken for things like zoom, but there are enough proof of concepts around now that Apple really should be able to nail it. Can we finally move up the priority list, Joz?
(Micro schadenfreuda dept.: Chad points us to the just sneak-peaked Blackberry App Center (kudos on the original naming there fellas!), which is — drum roll please — CARRIER bound.)
The iPhone shook up a very complacent smartphone world, but if we think it exists in a vacuum, if we think the other big players won’t respond (no matter how embarrassingly long it might take them), and if we don’t hope that they do — hardcore style — to prevent Apple from one day getting just as complacent, then we’re not doing our jobs as bloggers or consumers.
With that, splinter-like, in mind, witness RIM launching the Blackberry Thunder, their first touch screen device. If you ever wondered how brilliantly Apple handled the release of the iPhone, from Steve pulling it from his pocket to the first videos and commercials, wonder no more. RIM’s shows us by way of terrible — near Microsoft’ian — example, how badly that could have gone… (Though Mike Lanman certainly makes a convincing Doby to Lazaridis’ Gollum…). Couldn’t have hired them Virgin folks again?
We’re still not sure about the whole-screen’s-a-button approach. And the newly launched GDGT podcast is right on when they say RIM needs new software and they need it now (and tell a very funny story about how RIM’s co-CEO really doesn’t get that… scary…)
The. Whole. Screen. Is. A. Flipping. Tic. Tac. Tile. Button.
Seriously. We kid you not (though RIM could be kidding us all?). Sister-site Crackberry.com has all the deets, but…
Seriously? Who’s the usability wizard who came up with this one? Who came up with the single-click point of failure concept? The one mechanism to break it all?
We get that haptics are hard, but the iPhone pretty much showed the industry how to do Touch, and rather than just add the Blackberry messaging powerhouse to that buttery goodness, RIM went and grafted on an mechanic straight out of every 1980s playschool game?
Bravo for challenging Apple (they certainly need it). And kudos for being brave enough to push the metaphor, to take the next step, to propel technology forward. But — seriously? — we hope the feel is light-years beyond the look on this one, and not just for Crackberry Kevin’s sake… Otherwise most annoying gadget innovation of the decade awards beckon…
We guess a certain internet dead-pan funny man was right on the “button” when he said:
THERE’S a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,” says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.”
Presuming he was really talking about the ThunderStorm…
