The iPhone is awfully hip, but hip and annoying aren't by any means mutually exclusive. Sure to rank very highly on iPhone owners' annoyance list is the phone's lack of a copy-and-paste feature. What if you want to e-mail a friend a quote from a website? You'll have to type it yourself, and you can't even look at the site and write the e-mail at the same time. Very inconvenient.

Since Apple hasn't addressed this, some other folks have stepped up to the plate. Some options have been available for a while, but they have usually required you to hack your phone. Now someone's cleverly invented a no-hacking-required, web-browser-based solution called Pastebud, which just launched today. We've played with it a bit, and we've got instructions on how to get it going (it's not exactly simple) and the verdict on whether or not it'll be useful to you.

Pastebud gets the job done, but the biggest downside is that it's very complicated to set up. It works entirely within Safari, the iPhone's web browser. It's something called a script — a very simple, mini-program that runs entirely within another, bigger program. You create two bookmarks for the script in Safari, and then load up one of the bookmarks whenever you want to either copy or paste.

You've got two options for setting this up. The least complicated one is to load up Internet Explorer or Safari on your computer, go to Pastebud's website, and bookmark the "Copy" and "Paste" links there. Go ahead and add the e-mail address you're provided on the website to your address book, as well. Then plug your iPhone into the computer and sync it with iTunes. Just make sure you check the "Sync bookmarks" option in iTunes' iPhone / iPod interface as seen below.

If you're a subscriber of Apple's MobileMe service, sync your computer with MobileMe after you've created the bookmarks in your web browser; the bookmarks will be copied to your iPhone over the internet automatically.

Your other option is to set Pastebud up using only the iPhone. To do that, go to pastebud.com in Safari, and in the big green area on the right you'll see some instructions. You'll have to click on the capitalized word "COPY" (circled in the image to the right), then hit the Add Bookmark button (the plus sign) at the bottom. A few options will pop up; tap the "Add Bookmark" one, then click "Save" in the top right corner. Then — and this is the tricky part — you'll have to go into bookmarks and find the entries for COPY and PASTE, then click the edit button in the bottom right. Edit each of them and delete all the text in the address before the word "javascript" and save.

Now it's set up. Complicated enough for you? If you've gotten this far, you can actually use Pastebud now; the product's website has a link in that green area called "your secret pastebud address." If you ever want to copy something from an e-mail, just forward the e-mail to that address. If you want to copy something from a website, go there and then load up the "COPY" bookmark. There you'll be able to select some text then choose whether to e-mail it to someone or hit the "Copy" button it so you can paste it into a field on another website.

If you go to another website where you want to paste it, just load up the "PASTE" bookmark once there and you'll be able to pick between green-highlighted places to paste your text. 

Of course, whenever you do this, you'll get a notice encouraging you to actually buy the software.

But unfortunately we're not sure we can recommend buying it unless you're comfortable with the amount of hassle that's involved in getting it to work and using it. This is not the developer's fault at all; Apple just hasn't made it very easy for folks other than them to make things happen between multiple applications. Even when using Pastebud, you'll still be itching for a real solution. Hopefully whenever Apple finally gets around to it you won't have to pay $5 for it, either.

If you're just dying to be able to copy text between Mail and Safari, though, here's a video from the developer demonstrating the process: