iPhone dialing annoyances

When I first picked up my iphone, I was concerned that I’d have trouble with the lack of tactile feedback on the phone’s dialpad. I’d have to look at the buttons to dial instead of just going by touch. That hasn’t turned out to be a problem. There’s a couple of things that do annoy me, however. They’re not big things, but they tend to get in the way of being productive.

When looking at a web page or an email, the iPhone will detect strings that look like htey might be a phone number. These are hyperlinked and tapping one of them will cause the iPhone to offer to dial that number for you. It’s fantastic. The problem is, this doesn’t work in other places. Phone numbers in the notes or location field of a calendar item aren’t linked. Numbers in a notepad aren’t linked.

When I have a phone meeting, I don’t want to create a contact entry — this is often the only time I’ll ever call that number. When I’m on the phone and someone gives me a phone number that I need to write down, I need somewhere to stick it temporarily; the note app seems the logical place to do that. But to dial any number that’s in Notes or a calendar item, I need to write it down or memorize it so I can dial it manually.

Apple, please start linking phone numbers everywhere, or give me copy and paste so I can paste a number into the dialpad.

When you’re on a call, you can jump to your contacts list. You can read a contact, dial a contact and add them to your call, and all sorts of other things. But you can’t edit an existing contact. And you can’t add a contact. The contacts app is inexplicably missing the “add” and “edit” buttons in the contact list any time the phone is on a call. This makes no sense. There’s no technical limitation that should be preventing this. Apple intentionally made the decision to hobble the contact app when you’re on a call.

Many contacts have extension numbers. Since the contact app doesn’t have an extension field, I’d gotten into the habit of entering them with a fairly common notation: (555) 123-4567 x890. My Blackberry would dial that number for me, pause a few seconds, and then dial the extension. Great for automated phone systems.

The iPhone, however, doesn’t do anything with the numbers after the “x”. It just dials the number and then stops. I have to enter the extension manually. Doing so is made more difficult, however, by the fact that the iPhone doesn’t display the number that it just dialed, only the contact name. So I need to look at and remember the extension number before I dial the contact.

As a workaround, I’ve changed all the phone numbers in my address book to include pauses instead of extension numbers: (555) 123-4567,,890. This works, but it’s forcing me to enter data the way a computer recognizes it instead of the way a human recognizes it. Just about everywhere else in the iPhone, I enter information in a human-recognizable form and the phone figures it out.

The great thing about the iPhone, however, is that it’s all software. So these issues are fixable without requiring me to replace the phone. So here’s hopping that an upcoming software update fixes these annoyances.