Alpha characters intrepreted as numbers in phone field

[Dr_Gibberish]

I cant imagine that I am the only person having problems with this, but have not been able to find any help on this issue...

I am a long time Outlook user and I have always stored descriptive text in my contact phone number fields - e.g. "925-528-8120 cell NOT for clients". I have this in a majority of my phone fields, and both my Treo and Blackberry would ignore these characters when dialing. When I ported this information to Gmail and then down to my Samsung Moment, everything went over fine, but now when I press a contact's phone # to dial it, the letters are interpreted as numbers and so the phone dials something like "925528812023556683672543687" (and of course the call does not go through). Does anyone know of any way to get around this, short of editing every one of my contacts to remove the letters (and losing this information?)

FYI, I have a Samsung Moment running 1.5 and I apologize if this is already
addressed in 2.0 Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[UncleMike]

I don't have any experience with or access to anything prior to Android 2.0, but on my Droid I can change the label for a number to Custom, and then make it whatever I want. So, when a contact has multiple office phones for example, I can label them as New York Office, Chicago Office, etc. I haven't seen this ability in Gmail on my desktop, but changes made on the phone do carry over and are visible on my desktop.

I know this isn't quite what you're looking for, but I thought I would throw it out there in case nothing better comes along.

BTW, I'm resisting doing what I described above, in the hopes that a better solution will come along. I really think that there needs to be two descriptive fields for each number - the first being a type (i.e. Mobile, Landline, Fax, Pager, Modem, etc.), and the second being a customizable field. When displaying a number, an icon could be used to represent the first field value, along with the text of the second field value.

I had this capability on a previous phone, and it really comes in handy when there are more than one type of number for a contact. When I switched to a Blackberry I found it really frustrating to not have this capability.

 

[Dr_Gibberish]

Thanks for the input UncleMike, I had not actually realized that and it is a solution to the problem, just a VERY long and tedious one. I cant imagine going through more than 800 contacts with more than a couple phone numbers each, and cutting the text and pasting it into the custom field. By the way, my wife just got a new blackberry and her phone does the same thing (interpreting letters as numbers in the phone field.) Oh well, I think we both have a bit of work in front of us...