Have you ever received a text message or IM from a contact and wanted to quickly call that person back? Instead of searching for your contact with Universal Search, you have two quick options to get in touch with a contact directly from the Messaging app:

1. Click on the Contact Name banner on the top of the screen to load up the Contact record for the resource, and then click on appropriate method of communications (phone, email, SMS, IM).  Note that this action also works from within the Email application
2. Click on the button in the top-right corner (depending on your method of messaging, it may say TEXT, AIM, GOOGLE, etc), and then click on the Phone Icon () next to the number that you want to dial

Thanks to Thomas Coe for the tip suggestion

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Universal search is an extremely powerful tool within webOS that allows you to access all kinds of data on your phone within a matter of seconds and from anywhere on your device. To access Universal Search, all you need to do is start typing on the keyboard while in the Launcher or while in Card View (to access card view while in an App, simply swipe up from the gesture area to minimize that app). To search for a Contact using Universal Search, webOS will search for contacts based on Name, Nickname and Company and provide all matches to your query. Continue reading after the break to learn the specifics of how to search for contacts and what options are available once you find your contact.

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Setting a Speed Dial is a great way to quickly call up to 23 of your most common contacts. Once set, all you need to do is open the keyboard and press one key on the keyboard to access that number. Keep reading after the break to learn how to set these speed dial entries.

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webOS’s Synergy feature is nice and all, but let’s face it: sometimes you just want to get your contacts exported into a Comma Separated File (CSV) file so you can import them all into Google or Outlook. webOS definitely has a ‘client’ philosophy when it comes to contacts – it’s easy to bring stuff in, not so easy to push stuff out.

Enter chaosrecords in our forums, who has put together a handy guide for how to export your contacts from webOS into a CSV file you can then use as a handy backup or for import (possibly with some tweaking) into another system. Sprint users (and possiblly others, including Bell users) have a simple method: ##66623# on the dialer jumps you to a screen that lets you get a simple export dumped into the USB storage on your Pre or Pixi.

That code doesn’t work on AT&T (and seems sporadic for others), but fortunately for homebrewers there is a patch by bsiegel for exporting your contacts, as Derek wrote up this past January.

Source PreCentral Forums. Thanks to @MrKal_El for the tip!

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More and more patches arrive every week on WebOS Internals, and with each patch comes plenty of new and useful functionality. A new patch aims to alleviate a painful problem that has afflicted some Palm owners: getting your contacts out of the Palm Profile. As we’ve reported before, some users have run into an issue where a glitch between the Palm servers and your phone results in the Palm Profile’s personal data getting wiped.

The “Send All Contacts via Email” patch by bsiegel provides a way to get your contacts out of the Palm Profile and into whatever you want. The patch adds the menu option to export your contacts into a standard vCard file (which can take a while if you have a lot) and then attaches that file to an email for you to send to wherever you desire. We’ll use Google as an example here: once exported you can save the vCard file to your computer, and then upload all the contacts to Google by opening Contacts and clicking on Import.

Apart from transferring your contacts from the Palm Profile to Google, you can also use the patch to perform backups of your contacts data, as the patch does not discriminate between sources like Google, Palm, and Exchange.

Thanks to Matt for the tip!

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Do you want Microsoft Exchange for all that magical calendar, email, and contacts syncing and pushing onto your webOS phone, but don’t feel like paying for a server all your own? Mail2Web may be the solution you’ve been looking for. The service hooks into your current email accounts, including Gmail and Hotmail, as well as your ISP or business mails, pushes it through their Exchange servers, and down to your phone.

Mail2Web also provides you with something that your Palm Profile doesn’t give: online web browser access through a standard Outlook Web Access client. Mail2Web costs $4.95/month, though a 60-day free trial is currently available. For more information, check out Mail2Web’s website.

Of course, there are plenty of other hosted-exchange services out there like 4smartphone and 1and1 – which is your favorite?

Thanks to not-yet-pre for the tip!

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We at PreCentral receive a lot of tips throughout the day, but more and more over the past few weeks our inbox has been flooding with stories of users having just reset or replaced their webOS phones only to find that their Palm Profile did not back up all their data as promised. If you haven’t experienced this issue you’re in the lucky majority, but it seems the rate of the backup failures is accelerating and spreading.

We do feel your pain – one of our own staff members was hit by this bug and lost all of his contacts, calendar events, memos, and tasks. The only thing that was saved were his apps, which is a small consolation when you’ve just lost hundreds of phone numbers and email addresses accumulated over the years.

While we’re waiting for a third-party backup solution to land, we did some investigating. It turns out that the problem stems from corrupted backups, which is nothing new in the backup industry. Corrupted data happens all the time, but there are always safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t corrupt the system. Usually, that’s a prior backup. The issue is that the Palm Profile doesn’t keep anything other than the most recent backup, corrupted or not. Since your phone doesn’t provide any feedback on backups, even when they end up as corrupted, webOS users have no idea whether or not their backup was successfully completed. That is, until you reset your phone and realize that everything is lost.

Update: Palm has issued an official statement on the situation:

We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device

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If you were to ask us, we’d have your contacts’ birthdays all show up automagically in the calendar, like they did in the Palm OS of old. But it isn’t happening, and if you want to get around that, where there’s a will there is indeed a way. Reader weldonhd3 showed us two ways to get your birthdays into Calendar, dependent upon where those birthdays are coming from. Truly, weldonhd3 is a genius. And forgetful when it comes to birthdays. They go hand-in-hand, really.

First up is Google. Your Google contacts that have associated birthdays can be pulled into your Google Calendar and then synced down to your Pre. All you need to do is open Google Calendar in your desktop browser, click on Settings (top right corner), then Calendars. In the middle right of the page click on “Browse interesting calendars,” select the More tab, and then click Subscribe next to the “Contacts’ birthdays and events.” After a few hours the calendar should be added to your phone with the magic that is Synergy. From there, if you ever add a birthday to a Google contact it should appear in the calendar and be pushed back to the phone.

But that depends on you to do the work of entering birthdays. And work is unacceptable, right? You have Facebook, and your friends have mostly entered their birthdays into their profiles, so why not get it on your Pre? Through the magic of Facebook apps you can do it, though it lacks a bit of the automagic synergizin’ that we want. Here’s how it works: add the Birthday Exporter app to your Facebook profile, export to an iCal file, and then import it into Google Calendar.

Voilà, birthdays in calendar!

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While European Pre-owners are still waiting for their App Catalog to catch up to the US App Catalog and for paid apps to come along with it, they got a taste of the future recently and for some it left a bitter aftertaste. Thing is, the Photo Dialer app was recently updated and moved from being a free app to a paid one. While this didn’t pose a problem for US Pre owners (those who downloaded the app when it was free will continue to receive updates unless the developer releases a separate version like Pivotal Labs did with Tweed), the App Catalog on webOS 1.1.3 on the Euro Pre isn’t set up to deal with paid apps.

PreCentral Forum member Gizmo21 found this out the hard way. He had downloaded Photo Dialer when it was free and noticed that the paid version had somehow made its way into the Euro App Catalog with the price tag of €1.99 – and it was available as an update through the Updates app. As an intrepid Pre owner would do, he tapped on that Update button and tried to download, but the Pre balked at the request and threw up one of those yellow warning triangles to say it wasn’t working.

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Certain key elements remain every bit as instrumental to smartphones today as they did when the first Palm Pilot became available: Email, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks.

Although many of you are familiar with the idea that every smartphone has these basic features, perhaps there is no more important topic to discuss in a real review than a real-world day-to-day account of how these key components work in harmony on the job.

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