Last week, some privileged members of the press were given a quick demo of how the Copy/Paste feature might work in the next update for Windows Phone 7. We weren’t allowed to take photos or video, but we are allowed to describe it. Essentially there are two ways to copy text content. In a text message thread for example, you can tap and hold on a message and copy the entire thing. Or if you’re in a Word document or Internet Explorer, tap one word first to select that, then some handle bars will appear at the beginning and end of that word, which you can drag to select a large block of text. Then a tap/hold on that selection will give you a copy option.

Next you’ll want to paste that text somewhere. You can only paste text into text fields. So once you’ve tapped on an editable text field, the keyboard is going to show up, and right above the keyboard in the predictive text bar, there will be a paste button on the left side of that row. If you’re typing and you want to access the past button, you can swipe the suggestions to the right in order to reveal the paste button.

This is not the absolute definite way of how the copy/paste interface will work. Some things might change before release, but this is how it currently works in Microsoft’s internal builds while developing the next update.