auto-detect phone region

Can't the phone field auto-detect the country by looking at the phone number that is entered? if you required the country code? I'm dealing with an international site that I need phone number input on.

At the very least, you should not have separate fields for each country. Widget settings are content type (instance) dependent, and field settings handle all instances. The right thing to do would be to provide those as radio button options inside the widget_settings() form so you only need to create one field_phone and can change the type of phone number per-node.