If you are in an area where you do not get good service from your carrier, you have the ability to roam on other carrier’s networks for both voice and data. Depending on your level of service, roaming might be included in your monthly bill (e.g. Sprint gets "unlimited" roaming included) or it might be an extra charge, so be careful about how you set your Roaming options. To toggle these options:

• Open up the Phone app (), swipe down from the top-left corner to bring up the Phone application drop-down and select "Preferences". A new card will open with your Phone preferences options
• Scroll down to the "NETWORK" section
• To toggle Voice roaming, tap the "VOICE NETWORK" line and choose between "Carrier Only" or "Automatic".
• If you select "Automatic" for voice, you then get an option for "DATA ROAMING" where you can either be "Enabled" or "Disabled" data roaming
• Note that you can also turn off your Data Usage entirely here, if you are trying to conserve your plan’s data allowance.

Thanks to brendu for suggesting this tip
 

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Ensuring that you always have backups of your contact list is extremely important, in case you ever lose your phone or something goes wrong with a Profile restore after a webOS Doctor or device swap. Keeping your contacts in a cloud-based solution like Google or Yahoo is one solution to ensure you maintain a backup somewhere, but even then it would be a good idea to have a local backup. Unlike Palm OS, webOS does not have any local sync solution to pull your contacts from your phone, and you can only send the details of one contact at a time with the built-in functionality (without patching your phone, that is). Luckily, there is some hidden functionality in webOS that the carriers utilize to transfer your contacts off your phone and on to another (even a non-webOS phone). Keep reading after the break to learn how to take advantage of this functionality.

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As with many tasks in webOS, there is usually more than one way to accomplish a single action. This includes something as simple as hanging up the phone. The obvious way to hang up on a phone call is to tap the big red  Disconnect button () on the bottom of the Phone App while on a call. But you can also hang up a call by swiping up or pressing the center/LCD button to minimize the Phone app into card view and then just throwing the card off the top of the screen to close the app. A dashboard banner notification will appear for a few seconds letting you know that the call has ended. This is much easier if you don’t want to worry about not tapping the right spot on the screen or if you are driving and you don’t want to take your eyes off the road for too long. However, if you plan on making another call, you are better off trying to tap the disconnect button, otherwise you will need to load up the Phone App again!

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Speed dial apps certainly aren’t for everyone. It is not uncommon for webOS users to make the “no need” case against speed dial apps, as webOS does in fact have many speed dialing features built-in to its native functionality. There is the oh-so-handy universal search, soon to be rebranded as “Just Type.” There are physical keys aplenty just waiting to be assigned one-touch speed dial functionality. Point being, these are just some of the “no need” arguments waged against speed dial apps made for webOS, and we have to admit, these arguments are not without merit.

However, if one-touch assigned physical keys or “just typing” to speed dial isn’t enough for you, there are currently some twenty-some speed dial apps available to you in App Catalog. That’s nothing new, as speed dial apps have been among some of the very first available for download in the early days of the App Catalog, and have been a mainstay among apps since the days of Palm OS and the old-school Treo line.

One such speed dial app, Pronto Dial, $3.00 from angryGoat (love that name), has more than just hit my radar of late. It has replaced my phone app and landed a permanent spot on my Pre’s launch bar. Pronto Dial is a relative latecomer to the speed dialer party. It was first available just a few short months ago, early July 2010 to be exact, long after other speed dial apps had enjoyed nearly a full year of exposure and development, and even tens of thousands of combined downloads. To date, Pronto Dial clocks in with a respectable but room-to-move download count just over 2,200 total downloads as of this writing.

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Patching in webOS land is one of those areas where we can definitively gleefully mock declare our superiority claim a win over our friends with Android and iOS devices. The hundreds of patches available in Preware, through our forums, and even through some simple coding of your own provide customization options most platforms don’t even offer. WebOS Internals’ newest code magician, Sconix, has been hard at work whipping up a new mega patch that consolidates the functions of multiple patches into one neat little package. Unlike the much-lauded Advanced Configuration for Launcher patch, the new Advanced Configuration for System Preferences patch touches multiple apps in a multitude of ways. So many ways, in fact, that you’re going to have to head past the break to check it out.

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Setting a speed-dial in webOS allows you to use a single keyboard key to dial a specific pre-defined phone number (as previously discussed in this tip). Taking this one step further, you can easily set the corner letters on the keyboard (Q and P) for your two most important numbers so you can always access these numbers, even if you are in a position where you can not look down at your phone. Another option for you to quickly find a specific key is to use the F key because it has a slightly raised bump on it to indicate that it’s also the #5 key.

Does anyone else have any good systems for using speeddials?

Thanks to our own Jonathan Ezor for suggesting this tip

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While webOS allows you to tap on an email address to launch a new email, or to tap on a phone number to call it, you can also press-and-hold on those for additional options. If you press-and-hold on a phone number, you get a menu option to "Call", "Text" or "Add to Contacts", and if you press-and-hold on an email address, you get a menu option to "Send Email" or "Add to Contacts". Note that if the phone number or email is already in your contact list, the "Add to Contacts" option will not appear

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If you have any phone numbers that require you to type in PIN numbers (e.g. for voicemail or a conference calls) or phone extensions, you should consider adding pauses to the number. There are 2 types of pauses you can enter:

• Timed Pause: waits a few seconds before dialing the next set of numbers
• Hard Pause: waits for the user to indicate when to continue dialing the next set of numbers

To add these to a number, just type a "t" for a timed pause or a "p" for a hard pause. When trying to dial directly from the phone app, you will not be able to dial a "t" from the physical keyboard since the "t" shares a key with the number 3. Instead, you can press-and-hold the "*" key (either on the screen or on the keyboard) to insert a "t" or you can press-and-hold the "#" key for a "p". The example to the right is what happens when you dial: 234-555-6789p12345t987
 

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Ever wondered how to silence or ignore an incoming call when your phone is locked? When you are already using the phone and an incoming call appears, you are presented with a green or red button to answer or ignore the call, respectively, but you only get the green "answer" button when the phone is locked. This is where the ringer switch comes in:

• To silence the ringer, simply press the phone’s power button once. Per the comments, you can also tap either volume button.
• To ignore the call altogether and send it to voicemail, press the phone’s power button a second time
   

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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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