Bad tap behavior on form select

Bad tap behavior on form select

I am building a Rails 3.03 application using jQuery Mobile 1.0a3 to render mobile views.  I look at it in Safari on an old 1st-generation iPhone.

 

I have a collection_select in one of the forms. This renders a touchable control that looks like a button, which opens a pop-up select element with the list, so the user can select the option/value. So far, so good.

 

The problem…

 

If I tap the rendered button with just a quick tap, the select list will pop-up then immediately disappear (with no option/value selected).  Of course, this makes the UI look broken or hard to use. (I wonder if it might be a double-tap or ghost-tap problem.)

 

The good news is that if I press the rendered button for 500ms or so then release, the select list will pop-up and remain so the user can make a selection (the behavior I want).

 

I am not sure if I need to do something with touch event handlers, defaults, or what. Maybe it is my old phone…

 

Any ideas?