Best Format for Mobile Emergency Phone List

October 15, 2014 4:44 PM

I'd like to distribute an emergency phone list with numbers that are clickable on a smartphone.

I know how to make phone numbers clickable on a smartphone by including a tel: link, but I'm unsure of the best format - PDF with hotspots? HTML attached to an email? I've tried both and gotten them to work on my phone, but I'm wondering what will be easiest for most people.

I'm mostly concerned about Android and iPhone, and I want this file to be accessible offline. Importing to users' contacts is not an option, and neither is a custom app.

posted by beyond_pink to Technology (4 answers total)

iPhones turn anything that looks like a phone number into a clickable link -- I.e. 1-800-555-1212 will be a clickable number on my phone. Do other phones not do this? If they do, you're overthinking. They'll do the formatting for you, tel: not necessary.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 4:47 PM on October 15, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I just tried it on a Note. It did indeed turn the phone number into a link. The only issue I'd have with Notes is that it puts the most recently edited Note at the top of the list. So a set phone list would make it to the bottom of the list pretty quickly.
posted by Beti at 4:52 PM on October 15, 2014

On my phone running Android 4.4.4 I able to long press on the number to bring up the copy/paste tooling. It is smart enough to add dial as one of the things I can do with the selected text.
posted by phil at 5:01 PM on October 15, 2014

Adding to the suggestions above (and apologies if this is obvious) but remember to put lots of whitespace between lines.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:36 AM on October 16, 2014