Thoughts on S60

*UPDATE*!

Thanks to Eldar’s massive review of the 5800, I’ve learned that the 5800 and 5th Edition devices also support copy and paste in non-editable fields! Click the break after the first walkthrough to see how it works!

Like Ricky over at Symbian-Guru.com, I took it upon myself to download and install the SDK and emulator for the S60 5th Edition and have been playing with it very extensively. Following up with a video he recently posted about the various input methods for text fields, it seems a lot of people are curious as to how the copy and paste functions work on S60 without a physical pencil key. Although a bit different that what you may be used to, it’s still there and works very well with the touch interface.

First let me show you some sample text in an SMS window…

From here, you can drag your finger across the text to highlight it…

And last, if you press the options button (three horizontal lines) you will be presented with an all-too familiar menu…

Unfortunately, this same method doesn’t work for text found in websites, only for text that is editable, but hopefully we’ll see this ability availabe with updates to the firmware and browser in the future. Click the break to see how to copy and paste within non-editable fields (with the exception of the browser, of course).

Here is a sample of a received text message…

With the added touch screen, you can now drag your finger across the information in the received text…

As soon as you release your finger from sliding it across the text, a small pop-up window appears with only one option…

For the sake of this exaple, I then hit reply…

Just like before, you can then press the options button (three horizontal lines)…

Pressing the Paste button that appears on top of this menu will then paste the information you just selected and copied…

Again, I really hope this feature makes it to the browser in an update eventually (or even on the launch firmware? Please?), but I understand how it would be difficult to implement. Adding this option would make it confusing between using your finger to scroll around a website and trying to select text. My N810 supports both, but it takes me a fair amount of time to get it to do what I want in most situations.

Still, this is a HUGE step in the right direction!