Nexus S Text Selection Sounds Familiar
In the browser, you long press on text to bring up your anchors, then drag and tap the center of your selection — boom, copied text. In text editing fields, however, in order to select a word you must long press on the word, wait for a contextual menu to pop up, and then select “select word” — a completely counterintuitive process. In the message app you can long press to select only the entire message.
Joshua Topolsky
The quote is from Engadget’s review of the latest device in Android land. John Gruber pulls it from a mostly positive review as a small example of what’s wrong with Android: lots of tiny inconsistencies stacked high enough to be infuriating. I can’t pass much comment because I don’t have an Android phone: the iPhone is the only smartphone I’ve ever owned and used day to day, so my opinion is pretty worthless in comparing platforms, but this segment of the quote, as cherry-picked by me from John’s larger cherry-picking, applies just as much to iOS as Android.
On iOS, text selection is largely up to the app developer. There’s a lot of text you simply can’t select in apps; try selecting a song name in the iPod app, for example… no dice. Sometimes long-holding an element of the UI lets you copy the entire text of the held element, such as in Messages and Calculator, with no fine-selection mechanism. In Safari and other “web views” you long-hold and it selects the nearest word (or contents of the nearest DOM node, it depends on your zoom level) and then you can fine-tune your selection by dragging handles before hitting the Copy button. In text fields, long-hold doesn’t give you any selection, but gives you a menu to select the nearest word, or select all text, then you can copy. Still on text fields, if you double-tap-and-drag in one motion you get a selection over the dragged area, and you can then hit Copy.
iOS is probably a better mobile operating system for most people, the same way (to borrow an example from Steve Jobs) a Prius is probably a better vehicle than a pickup truck for most people. Be that as it may, consistency of text selection—or just lack of small infuriating inconsistencies—isn’t something it can brag about.