Z10 Browser – Phone numbers are not displayed as hyperlinks

Arrgh!!

Sometimes, as a user you may come across something in a mobile smartphone that you just wonder WTF where the internet development team was thinking when they missed something, well, just so obvious to you. 

Unfortunately I’m not a developer, but I have tested a cell phone on an entirely new network months before launch, thoroughly and brought many issues to the providers attention, so I have an affinity to the attention to detail when I actually do test a product. 

However, sometimes features cannot be implemented in a brand new product, built from the ground up entirely new. Considering there must be a team of considerable size internally to BlackBerry that should’ve at least noticed this, brought it to the development or product managers attention maybe it could’ve been implemented in the first two updates that have already come to pass for BB10. 

Issue: 

When viewing a phone number in the BlackBerry® Browser the phone number is not displayed as a hyperlink and is not click-able. The phone number appears as text.

Consideration: 

During testing, you mean to tell me that nobody internally in BlackBerry, actually visited a public website to load a contact number? I understand since a alpha/beta device a company does NOT want the public to know their testing new products before an official announcement is made. As such most public sites will be restricted or forbidden from anyone allowed to test to even goto – since developers had restrictions when they initially received their DevAlpha BB10 devices, this would follow suit, yet the browser was fully functional, along with the User Agent String not yet defined until the last 40 days before January 30 launch of the Z10. So … nobody found this issue? 

This article – KB27690 – lists the resolution and workaround as such listed below. 

Resolution: 

This is a previously reported issue that is being investigated by our development team. No resolution time frame is currently available.

 

Workaround: 

Manually copy and paste the phone number into the phone application.

 

BlackBerry, you do know the internet, the web as it is, has many CSS stylesheets, frames and such that would make copy & paste on a smartphone – with a REAL browser (not some mobile crap) – a little less user friendly right? 

BlackBerry … please fix this amongst adding other features to the next major update – please, pretty please?