Create and Manage Favorites

Favorites, one of the most important features in the Phone application, serve to tie the phone together with several other applications on your Treo. A favorite is a piece of information you'd like to be readily accessible via a special link in the Phone application. It can be a speed dial number, an email address, or a web address, to name a few possibilities. By default, several favorites are displayed at the bottom of the main Phone screen, as shown in Figure 7.9.

The favorites visible in Figure 7.9 are just the tip of the iceberg. To open the full favorites screen, press the Down button on the five-way navigator to scroll through the list of favorites until the list expands to fill the screen. Figure 7.10 shows the full favorites screen with several buttons in view.

You can tap any favorites button to activate that particular favorite, or you can navigate through the favorites with the five-way navigator. For example, tap the Camera favorites button to immediate launch the digital camera. The list of favorites gives you an idea of how flexible favorites can be. You might notice page numbers at the bottom of the screen for accessing additional pages of favorites. Just tap one of the numbers to jump to another whole page of favorites.

You can edit individual favorites buttons as well as the placement and ordering of buttons on the favorites pages. However, the best way to understand how favorites work is to create a new one. You can create the following types of favorites:

• Call Log Open the phone's call log

  Note

  If you're wondering how to forward calls to another number, this topic is covered later in the chapter in "Tweak the Phone Preferences."

  
  

• Dial Pad Display the Dial Pad

• Contacts Open a contact in the Contacts application

• Application Launch an application

• Speed Dial Dial a number by using the phone

• Message Send an SMS/MMS message by using the Messages application

• Email Send an email message by using the VersaMail application

• Web Link Open a web link by using the Blazer web browser

As you can see, there's quite a bit of flexibility in how you can create and use favorites. However, you'll likely find yourself creating favorites primarily for phone numbers (speed dial). To create a new speed dial favorite in the Phone application, follow these steps:

Note

It might seem a little strange that you can enter the ring tone for a speed dial favorite because you hear a ring tone only on an incoming call. The ring tone for a speed dial favorite has nothing to do with initiating a call and is used only to help identify a particular caller (number) when the person calls you.

To use a favorite, just tap the favorites button for it. Optionally, if you established a quick key for the favorite, hold down that key to use the favorite.

As you've seen, favorites buttons are arranged on pages in the Phone application. You can rearrange the buttons on the pages in any order you want by editing the pages. To edit the favorites pages, follow these steps:

Favorites are an incredibly powerful part of the Treo user interface, and when used wisely, can dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of how you work with your device.