METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ACCESSING A CONTACTS DATABASE AND TELEPHONE SERVICES

Sophisticated computer-enhanced mobile telephones require intuitive user interfaces in order to allow a user to take advantage of all the available features. The present invention discloses an intuitive telephone system user interface that provides both simple familiar and new powerful user interfaces to the user. In one embodiment, the user is presented with four permanently available user interface views and a fifth user interface view that is available when there is an active telephone call. The first permanently available view is a dial pad view that is similar to a common touch tone dial pad. A second permanently available view is a speed dial view that allows users to easily create their own customized speed dial buttons that are easy to navigate between and can be edited at any time. The third view is the call history view that displays a list of previous incoming, outgoing, or missed calls and may be filtered as desired by the user. The final permanently available view is a contacts view that provides a filtering mechanism that allows the user to quickly search through a large personal contacts database. The fifth user interface view is the active call view that displays a set of command buttons for accessing advanced telephone features during a telephone call such as hold, three way calling, DTMF touch tones, hang-up, speakerphone, etc.