Actually, it would. Apple is asserting a patent (from 1996) against Android's "Linkify" functionality which does exactly that.
Other prior art would be Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb (1994/1995) for turning CamelCase into links and, my personal favorite, Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, for "Live URLs" (that recognized URLs and email addresses in mail and news text and made them clickable).
I've been following this off and on, and AFAICT, HTC didn't bring up any of these piece of prior art, which makes me seriously question the quality of their prior art searches.
Other prior art would be Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb (1994/1995) for turning CamelCase into links and, my personal favorite, Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, for "Live URLs" (that recognized URLs and email addresses in mail and news text and made them clickable).
I've been following this off and on, and AFAICT, HTC didn't bring up any of these piece of prior art, which makes me seriously question the quality of their prior art searches.