PhotoDial for your Treo 650

One of the neat functionalities found within the Treo 700w ‘Today’ screen that I reviewed a few weeks ago is the option to create Photo Speed Dials.

Now, thanks to a new application called Photodial  you can also benefit from this on your Treo 650.

I found PhotoDial to be extremely easy to setup and use. 

To get started:

1) Just launch the application and press the ‘New’ button on the bottom right.
2) Press the ‘Name’ button to open your Contacts list.

3) Find the contact that you want to create a speed dial for and select the relevant number that you want to use then press ‘OK’.
4) All of the information including the Photo (if one is available) are auto-filled from your contacts into PhotoDial.  Just press ‘OK’ to finalize the creation.

5) Your PhotoDial is ready to use.
6) Press either the photo icon that you have created or the ‘Phone’ button to dial that number.

All in all it probably takes less than 30 seconds to setup each button with Photodial.

PhotoDial also offers some other options to create speed dials.  For example, instead of looking up the number in your Contacts you can simply write the name and number then choose either one of the 39 available built-in Icons (which are extremely well designed) or any Photo that you may have either on your Treo or an SD card (see images below).

Also, as you may have noted earlier, each time you create a new PhotoDial button it offers you the option to “Show Icon in Launcher” which means that it will appear in your regular Application screen (see below left) both in your ‘All’ category as well as a separate ‘PhotoDial’ one providing you with another simple click-to-call button.

Finally, the latest version of PhotoDial allows you to map the application to the green Phone button on your Treo.  Once this has been setup, pressing the green Phone button once will open your PhotoDials while pressing it a second time will take you to your regular Phone screen (above right).  This works extremely well but because the double green Phone press can only be activated when you are not already on the Phone screen I also added a Favorites button for PhotoDial as well as the Quick Key ‘P’ to quickly open my photo speed dials.

At this stage, my only request would be for the next version of PhotoDial to include an option to add “Extra Digits” as the built-in Favorites Buttons currently have.  Better still would be to also have the “Calling Card” and other dialling options that TakePhone (my preferred Contacts replacement solution) offers.

Overall, I have been impressed by how elegant (both on the design and technology fronts) as well as user friendly Photodial is (particularly in the latest 1.4 version) and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to implement a quick and simple photo speed dial functionality to their Treo 650.

Treonauts always have the best utilities…