By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – January 03, 2011 at 02:00PM
Back in October we showed you a way to create visual speed dial icons on your iPhone’s home screen, but the process required a bit of work. One resourceful reader simplified that process and created iSpeedDial, which works much better.
Reader John P., with a little help from soggy_cheerio, created a webapp called iSpeedDial that you can load in mobile Safari on your iPhone and create mobile speed dial icons. All you need to do is fill out a small form with the person’s name, number, and photo (which is optional, though it’s visual in visual speed dial so you probably want it). Once you submit, you’ll be prompted to call the number you entered. Cancel, then save the page to your home screen. It will create an icon with the picture you provided and tapping it will initiate a call.
In addition to being pretty easy, the really great benefit of this mobile webapp is that the visual speed dial icons you create do not require an internet connection. This makes initiating the call quite a bit faster, plus it’ll work when you don’t have any data service reception (which you’ve probably experience if you’ve ever been inside of a tall building or driven through a rural area on a road trip).
iSpeedDial is free to use and Skype speed dial is a welcome feature that may be added in the future.
You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.