Last week I had another one of those Duhreka! moments; a combination of Eureka!, I found it, and Duh!, it should have been obvious, you moron.
Myrl had gone back to Texas for a week on a family matter, and she left me a list of phone numbers where she could be reached. I started creating a group of temporary Address Book entries for the hotels and other places that weren’t already in my Contacts, when I realized there was a much simpler way.
In the back of my mind I was aware that you could click on a phone number on a web page and the iPhone would dial it.
Anyway, I thought if iPhone recognizes a phone number on a web page and dials it, where else does it recognize phone numbers?
The answer is just about anywhere: in a Note, an e-mail, a calendar event, a text edit document, a Pages document. About the only places where iPhone didn’t recognize a phone number was in a spreadsheet or pdf. So I just created a quick note like this and all I had to do was tap it to call.
Moreover, the iPhone was smart enough to recognize a phone number whether you formatted it as 541 555 1234, (541) 545 1234, 5415551234 or some combination thereof. I didn’t try binary or Roman Numerals, but if iPhone can’t handle those, Siri probably can.