Digg Founder Says Copy/Paste Coming In iPhone 3.0

Over the weekend at the South By Southwest 2009 conference in Austin, Texas, Rose claimed to have it on good authority that Apple will include copy/paste in the upcoming iPhone 3.0 release, which Apple is expected to unveil in a Tuesday event at its Cupertino, Calif. headquarters.

Rose made his declaration in a yet-to-be-aired taping of the weekly video podcast Diggnation that was filmed at the conference.

Apple didn't include native copy/paste in the first two iterations of the iPhone operating system, and third party efforts to bring this functionality to the device have largely been kludgy. But in iPhone 3.0, users will simply double-tap a word and drag quote marks around the text they wish to select, and then choose between copy, cut, or paste options, Rose said in the podcast.

The iPhone 3.0 software will also include other unspecified features aimed to bringing the iPhone up to speed with Palm's Pre smartphone. "Everything that the Palm Pre thought they had on Apple has now gone away," Rose said in the podcast.

However, video recording, another feature for which iPhone users have long pined, won't be part of the iPhone 3.0 release due to technical issues, Rose said.

Palm unveiled the Pre in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, and the company plans to launch the device through Sprint, its exclusive carrier partner, sometime in the first half of the year. Palm is hoping the Pre will help pull it from the economic doldrums, and many industry experts see the long-awaited smartphone as a viable challenger to the iPhone.

However, according to a recent Gartner study, Apple is having trouble moving iPhone 3G inventory. Apple reportedly sold 4.4 million iPhones in the first fiscal quarter, down from fourth quarter sales of 6.9 million.