How Apple could implement Copy\Paste using a touch screen

Saw this over at BoingBoing, amazing that Apple developed this tech nigh on 15 years ago, but couldn't shoe-horn it in to the iPhone!

The video is an example of the Apple Newton in action ... doing ... Copy ... Paste!

And if that video doesn't work on here, then here's the source

Whenever I need to move around a line of text on the iPhone I put my finger on the area of text i'm looking to edit, then a magnifying glass pops up and in a balloon it shows me a few of the characters under the highlighted area. I can then roll my finger from one side to the other to shift the cursor left or right pretty easily. I think these taps and double taps on a text area, and the magnifying glass to refine the selection a bit more, and word\sentence\paragraph snap-to is a great way to go about implementing this! Would love to shift text from Emails in to Texts, web text to email\text, anywhere in to the actual phone softwares number fields for entering dial in details ... Annoying that I cannot.

Classic example of when a fancy iPhone and no pen nearly led to a time keeping disaster! I was suppose to dial in to a meeting last week, didn't have a pen let alone a scrap of paper on me, and couldn't memorise (eek!) the 8 digit passcode for the conference call. 45347687, or was that 54347687, or was it 4543.687 darn i've forgotten a digit, recheck ... ok got it, now tap tap tap, nope that's not it, GRRRR! Well, because I couldn't copy it from the text message and paste it in to the phone touch-pad I ended up misting up the car window then writing the number out, and then tapping it in to the phone. From Phone, to Window, and back to Phone. Sheer genius on my part I thought! But wish I didn't have to reach for a pen or mist up a window when I'm using this gadget!

Note to Microsoft: Please make a decent uncluttered easy to use phone, like this iPhone ... I'd buy it in a Flash (get it? Flash not supported on iPhone, arf arf)!!!