Dial 9 - A Smart Visual Dialer

Developer: Flicck
Category: Utilities
Version: 1.0
Release Date: April 14, 2009
Size: 1.6 MB
Price: $0.99
Rating 5/10

Those of you feeling bored with or limited by the iPhone's "Favorites" list will appreciate Dial 9, a graphical replacement for calling, texting, or emailing your most frequently used contacts. Dial 9 puts a photo of your contacts on a colorful screen, so calling them is as simple as tapping their photo.

When you tap the photo of your contact, a menu pops up, giving you the option to call, send an SMS or an email, view their contact information, change their photo, or show a map of their address. You can have up to nine contacts per page (hence the name of the app), and up to ten pages, for a potential total of 90 contacts. You can change the background of the application screen by page, from electric blue to corinthian leather, so that you can differentiate your drinking buddies from your church choir, for example.

And...that's just about it. It's the iPhone "Favorite" screen with photos. The nice thing about utilities like this is that they can let iPhone users play with their interface, allowing them to customize the look and feel of their phone. The bad thing about utilities like this is that you're paying $0.99 for functionality you essentially already have. This application is useful for those of us who have a large number of contacts to manage, giving each of them their own "Favorites" screen. But if you only call a handful of people frequently, you're arguably just as well (or better) off with the tools Apple gave you