What am I not doing?

[goomer722]

I just got a Strat - my first Android phone. What do I do to select, copy & paste text with the physical keyboard? Thanks for any & all help.

 

[Dave-in-Decatur]

I just got a Strat - my first Android phone. What do I do to select, copy & paste text with the physical keyboard? Thanks for any & all help.

Yeah, that stumped me at first too.The short answer: with the physical keyboard, you can't. It has to be done on the touch screen. For those of us not blessed with the fingers of a surgeon or a violinist it is a chore. (Or maybe I'm the only one....)

From p. 60 of the Strat User Manual (available as a PDF here):

1. Touch the text to display the insertion cursor [a blue pentagonal icon], then touch the cursor to display edit tools.
2. Touch Select word or Select all to display the selector cursors.
3. Touch and drag the cursors to highlight the text you want to select, then touch Cut or Copy from the pop-up menu.

It's that "touch and drag the cursors" that I find so hard. The pentagon splits in two, and you have to touch just the right place on each half (it seems to be on the top points) and drag/slide them over the screen to just the right place to select what you want. After 3 months, I'm getting the hang of it, but it's still difficult.

Two other things: I sometimes find it easier, if the total amount of selectable text is small, to do Select all rather than fool with the cursors. It's easier for me to paste and delete than to select precisely. Secondly, in most text-entry fields, if you long-press (tap and hold) the field you'll get a Select or Paste menu, depending on the situation. These can be easier to work with too.

 

[goomer722]

Thanks! That explains why I was seeing 2 cursors. I'll start practicing.

 

[rickhamilton620]

Once you have the text you selected copied or cut, you can paste using the hardware QWERTY via menu key + v

 

[goomer722]

Thanks! That's good to know.

 

[Dave-in-Decatur]

Thanks for the tip, rick. However, I just tried it, and it doesn't work for me. I tried holding down menu and pressing v, and pressing first menu, then v. Neither one pasted. Holding menu and pressing v inserts a v, then brings up the menu.

 

[goomer722]

Holding down menu & pressing v worked for me. I can't explain it.

Shifting gears: on my HP Pre2 I could do a "warm" restart (analagous to ctrl+alt+delete by simultaneously pressing fctn+symbol+r. Is there any similar key combination on the Strat?

Thanks for your help

 

[rickhamilton620]

As far as I could remember, the only way to soft reboot the stratosphere is by holding down power and choosing reboot.

 

[MofoMan2000]

If you're typing text, just like a computer you can hold shift and use the arrow keys to select text, but only in a textarea (where you have a text cursor).

 

[Dave-in-Decatur]

Thanks, MofoMan! It took me a bit to figure it out but I found that if I have just been typing or moving the cursor, I can in fact often select text with shift+arrow, though it's hard to get it to work in a way that feels really consistent. (And this is not mentioned even in the large Stratosphere user's manual.) This will be really helpful to me.

But I can't find any way to get the physical keyboard to paste using menu+v, as rick and old_kansan have described.

 

[goomer722]

Thanks to all you folks for your courteous and insightful replies. It's nice to know that people still want to help people.

 

[chase2hoop]

Yeah, that stumped me at first too.The short answer: with the physical keyboard, you can't. It has to be done on the touch screen. For those of us not blessed with the fingers of a surgeon or a violinist it is a chore. (Or maybe I'm the only one....)

I have a friend that is a violinist, and even she has trouble with copy and paste on her Droid 3...

 

[MofoMan2000]

Thanks to all you folks for your courteous and insightful replies. It's nice to know that people still want to help people.

As I see it, that's what the Android community is all about. Google has created something great here, but it's not always completely intuitive. So it's our duty to help each other out.

Hehe, I said duty.