how do I detect if the browser is on a phone?

Question

I'm trying to build an anchor tag that uses one of those tel://xxxxxxxxxxx links to dial a number. But these links don't work on a non-phone computer.

Is there a way I can detect a phone so that I can dial the number on phones but copy the number to the clipboard on non-phone??

I want to support all phones possible so I don't want to do navigator sniffing..

You could put it in an if statement with actions based on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005153/auto-detect-mobile-browser-via-user-agent — , Nov 17 '12 at 10:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 17 '12 at 11:06

More of a suggestion than a technical solution, but maybe you could add a second link for copying the phone number to the clipboard. This way it's much more clearer to your end user what action is going on.

Note that non-phone computers can have dialing functionality too. My work laptop has Lync integrated in its browser, so when I click a tel: href it starts dialing. Going with the default behavior of the end user's browser will give the best user experience imo.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 18 '12 at 10:41

1

The tel link is not really necessary on modern systems as telephone numbers are recognized automatically if there are any programs installed that can dial them

answered Nov 18 '12 at 10:41

Jörn Berkefeld

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how do I detect if the browser is on a phone?

2 Answers2