By AppleInsider Staff

Published: 11:50 AM EST (08:50 AM PST)

One developer burning the midnight oil has stumbled upon references to copy and paste in the frameworks of Apple's first beta of iPhone Software 2.1, potentially offering new hope for one of the most requested and conspicuously absent features of the company's mobile software.

The findings, contained within the English-language 'Localizable.strings' file located in 'System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebKit.framework' are also accompanied by references to the Spotlight search, text-to-speech, file uploads, and the Finder.

Therefore, it's unclear whether those references represent the groundwork for upcoming iPhone features or simply exists as carryovers from the WebKit frameworks used to develop applications for the Mac and Windows PCs.

Other findings by the same developer include preferences to an Apple MobileRadio application, which has also yet to surface.

When asked earlier this month about the absence of copy and paste functionality in the iPhone software, Apple vice president of product marketing Greg Woswiak said the feature was not a priority and that engineers simply hadn't gotten around to it yet.