Some time ago my iPad Contacts app has begun an odd behaviour of incorrectly formatting American telephone numbers. Instead of displaying "(415)-123-1234", for example, it displays "41 5123 1234". Even when I create a new contact on the iPad, the telephone number is forced into the same odd spacing pattern.
I've checked all of the international settings I can find. I am set up for American telephone numbers, both on the iPad (General > International > Region Format) and on my Mac (System Preferences > Language & Text > Formats). On my Mac, the Address Book displays numbers with the correct formatting, and when I log into iCloud directly the numbers are also displayed correctly. Since the iPad syncs with iCloud, I'm surprised that the formatting isn't carrying over.
I do spend a lot of time in England, so I have quite a few telephone numbers in the British format as well as lots in the American format. I don't recall having ever set the device to British standards, though, and manually entering the correct spacing and punctuation seems to have worked until recently.
I've taken the iPad to the Apple Store and wasn't able to get a very helpful answer (though I haven't yet made a specific appointment for this at the Genius Bar). It's a fairly minor annoyance, but I thought I'd post the question on the off chance that someone can see an answer that I've not thought of myself.
Best Answer
The phone number format is set in Settings -> General -> International -> Region Format.
But believe it or not, it seems like your carrier is actually able to override whatever you've got set there (on my WiFi iPad, changing the Region Format updates Address Book's format, but on my iPhone it doesn't have any effect).
While researching it I saw some mention of Verizon fixing this issue by dialling
*228, waiting for it to connect, then dialling1and waiting for it to disconnect.Is it a 3G iPad? Perhaps while you were in England, something got switched over.