According to Engadget (see post below) as well as a number of other online news sources, the iPhone now does screen caps.

Wow.

Who would’a thunk it? You mean we can instantly get a screengrab of whatever is on our screen at the moment?

You might have heard that the latest iPhone 2.0 beta firmware allows users to save web images to its running camera roll for later download to its host machine (or sharing via email). Well, a reliable source let us know that the image capturing good times don’t end there: the iPhone now capable of taking full screen caps (like the one above) simply by holding the sleep button, then tapping the home button. We haven’t personally tested either technique (we already know what you’re thinking: we can’t say whether it captures screens from a video), but apparently it flashes white to indicate the cap’s been taken and the image has been added to your roll. Let’s hope these two neato features make it to the release firmware.

You’ll have to excuse my facetious tone for just a moment. You see, Windows Mobile phones have been doing the screen capture thing for years. I’ve personally used at least four capture tools, and there’s gotta be a good bit more out there.

As far as the cute hardware shortcut key trick, two points:

1) Not to sound rude or anything, but does Apple know that they’ve only got two buttons to work with? Better give some thought as to where you’re assigning that shortcut…

2) WM owners have the nifty option of setting their hardware keys to whatever they want! Yup, that’s right…we can selectively choose to invoke any application with the simply press of a button.

Someone please wake me up when the iPhone comes up with something WM can’t do (UI aside).

(iPhone screengrab credit to EngadgetMobile.com).