I never even bothered to research this issue when I was considering upgrading my PalmOS phone.

I figured with all of the complaints back when the 650 was new about how it could not automatically dial a business contact's extension number after pausing for the call to connect, that this would have been fixed a LONG time ago.

Wrong!
Palm Inc still requires you to dedicate a Favorite slot to any and all numbers with an extension you want to dial, and to dial it from the favorites interface, not from your contacts database.

/rant on
This is ridiculous! How many versions of hardware and how many tweaks have they implemented to this platform between the first 650 and now the 755p?? And this NEVER got fixed somewhere along the way??

I remember when so much of the Palm Pilot team's development work was focusing on making interface features you need available when and how you need them, to optimize the user's experience and efficiency.

Heck, my PalmOS4 (yes, FOUR) Kyocera 7135 handled this from the get go with commas. I think it was even handled correctly in my PalmOS 3(!!!) Qualcomm 6035! And no one in Palm has bothered to fix their address/contacts application since it was pointed out back in the 600 and/or 650?


Yes, I know there is a fine programmer out there that wrote TakePhone as a third party contacts/dialer (and more) program, and that it does not suffer from this oversight. Thank heavens for Palm's third party programmers!

But no one should HAVE to buy a third party app to fix something Palm has (or darn well SHOULD have) known about for years and many revisions ago, and should require so little effort to implement.

/rant off

Surely this is not something that the carriers stipulated they wanted to not be implemented? I guess it would increase the carriers' revenues if someone had to look up the contact's extension while the call is in progress, or end up going through a receptionist ...
But Motorola doesn't suffer this oversight with their Razors.
And the Razor is not sold as a BUSINESS phone, per se.

I wonder if the new Centro has this same problem?
If they fixed it on their cheap consumer phone while failing to address it in on their latest generation expensive business phone, how sad is that?