Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Singhal's official title is program manager on the Windows Phone engineering team. Unofficially, she's the "queen of copy and paste," as some of her co-workers good-naturedly call her. It was Singhal who led the team that created this feature, the highlight of the March update."

Priyanka Singhal is a Program Manager on the Windows Phone engineering team. You may not have heard of her, but, I bet you probably have heard of the feature she was in charge of. It is one of the more prominent feature of the March NoDo update if not the most. Yep, 'Cut and Paste.'

Michael Stroh from the windowsteamblog just posted his interview with Priyanka regarding 'Cut and Paste.' He posed the following 10 questions to Priyanka:

Read more...

"The first Windows Phone 7 software update, codenamed "NoDo," will RTM in January, possibly this very week and in time for the CES keynote. But it won't ship to users until early February, once the carriers sign off on it. This update will include the famed copy and paste functional addition, support for the Qualcomm 7×30 smart phone chipset, a CDMA location stack, and a number of software fixes."

Wondering what you can expect for updates in 2011 for your Windows Phone 7 device? Paul Thurrott over at the Windows Phone Secrets site has some information. The hotly anticipated copy and paste feature should be shipping in an update around the first of February, and later in the year Internet Explore 9, a new rendering engine, and more should appear. Additional details are available via the Read link.

"In addition to talking up Windows tablets and slates at the January Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Microsoft execs also are expected to use the conference to give another push to Windows Phone 7. But the first "major" update to the WP7 platform may not hit until August or September of 2011, my sources claim."

Image Courtesy of Engadget

We've been hearing the rumours about an update in January that will bring copy/paste functionality, and some fixes, to Windows Phone 7 - but this major update, code-named "Mango", coming in the fall of 2011 is a new one. Described by some as Windows Phone 7.5, it's rumoured to bring Silverlight and HTML 5 support to the browser, enhanced Asian language support, and other features.

2011 will be the year Microsoft definitely proves, of fails to prove, that they have the agility required to rapidly grow their new platform with features and enhancements demanded by users (and already offered by competitors). It's make it or break it time for them!

There's been a lot said in the past week about the fact that Windows phone 7 won't have copy and paste functionality at launch - and even more was said (in a rather loud tone of voice) once Microsoft statements came out that this was by design because most people don't "need" copy/paste. While it's not a feature that every user would use regularly, it's one of those features that is important to have in certain scenarios - and even if you might only be in one of those scenarios once a month, without copy and paste, odds are you can't accomplish what you want. We've had some high-spirited discussions about copy/paste in our forums, with some members saying that they think implementing copy/paste should be "relatively easy". Having watched Microsoft closely over the years, and watched as seemingly simple features took years to come to fruition, I disagreed with the idea that implementing copy and paste would be as simple as some people think it is. I'm not a developer, however, and can't properly explain the challenges.

Image Credit: Julian Cole - Adspace Pioneers.

In light of this, I figured there was one person I could turn to: Mel Sampat, formerly a member of the Windows phone team, and now on his own at Mist Labs. He wasn't a member of the shell team - the team that would handle copy/paste - so he's neither representing Microsoft here nor is it trying to explain or justify the decisions of the shell team. He was, however, on the Windows phone team until a few weeks ago, so he has insight into what it takes to implement features on Windows phone 7. Check out the interview after the break. Read more...

"Contrary to the controversial report out of Microsoft MIX10 this week that Windows Phone 7 Series will not feature copy & paste functionality, a person close to the den explained that copy & paste is definitely a scenario and feature that the team is putting a lot of thought about and hope to bring to the platform soon after initial release."

This echoes what I know about the topic and have been trying to say in our very lively discussion on the subject (between the weeping and gnashing of teeth). If this rumour is accurate though, Microsoft has done itself a huge disservice by trying to spin this as a by-design feature rather than telling us "Look, we know you want it, we want it, but we just couldn't pull it off in time - but we're making a commitment to do it as soon as we can." Honesty is always better than trickery. This whole thing has made this a day I want to end soon (that photo above is how I feel right now).

"Ready for another long, drawn-out copy and paste controversy to overtake your every waking moment for a year or two? Good: Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won't be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series... so that's that."

This is one of the groan-worthy things I learned about Windows phone 7 about a month ago, but haven't been able to share because it was under NDA. So...uh, yeah, no copy and paste right now in the product. Every MVP in the room had a fit when this information was revealed; it was real "shock and awe". We of course immediately started asking the team how they could leave out something so core to user experience, and the general response was that they wanted to have it in the product, but they couldn't fit it in by shipping time. I know, I know, many of you will feel they should have left something else out of the product and put in copy and paste. But, you know, there's this update thing that might make painful omissions like this easy for Microsoft to fix in the months after they go code complete, but before the products actually hit the shelves. The Zune HD that I took out of the box was missing a bunch of feature until I connected it and got the update so...there's hope. But proceed with your screaming and ranting anyway. ;-)

UPDATE: Todd Brix from Microsoft is saying the lack of copy/paste is by design.