It’ll still be a few days before I’m done overhauling our guides section, but there is one little trick we think deserves to jump right past the queue and slip into a news post as its something a lot of people may have overlooked.

One gripe people have with Buddy Beacon is that it appears to be unable to access your contact list, requiring you to manually input the number for every new buddy. In this age of endless contact lists, can anyone remember the last time they sat down to memorize a phone number? Unless you’re Rain Man, getting buddies into Buddy Beacon can seem like a many-stepped process.

Fortunately, there is a way to import numbers from your contact list. It’s just not very intuitive.

How to add numbers from your contact list with Buddy Beacon:

1. Open Buddy Beacon
2. Click into the Phone Number text field, as if you’re going to type a number
3. Hit the left soft key to bring up the Menu
4. D-pad over to the “Search” dropdown, represented by a magnifying glass.
5. Press 3, or click the third option, “Insert Mobile Number”
6. After your contact list loads, select the contact you want to add.

Turns out, the functionality is built right into the browser. Contacts are imported a lot faster on some devices (Mysto) than they are on others (Ocean), the label is a bit whack (”Insert Mobile Number” sounds like a quick way to insert your own number), and the placement under the Search menu makes no sense - but hey, it’s better than having to copy the number to paper every time you want to add a new buddy.

You may now return to sending each other locate requests just for the hell of it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 12:08 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.