Most people easily remember the three or four digit extensions of coworkers they need to contact regularly.
That works great when you are in the office, but what about when you are out and about? Sometimes the mapping of the extension to the direct-dial number is not as easily remembered.
The software in a cellphone could easily deal with this. Dial the four digits, press CALL, and the phone either prepends the necessary direct-dial digits or looks up the extension-to-full-number mapping in your address book for you.
Four or five keypresses is faster than you could look up an entry in the address book by name on most phones.-- krelnik, Aug 28 2004 // Four or five keypresses is faster than you could look up an entry in the address book by name on most phones.//
Motorola user, eh?-- jutta, Jan 30 2006 The best cellphone UI I've ever seen was on a circa 1997-98 Sprint dual-band made by Qualcomm. The phonebook function was outstanding, easy and understandable and you could program in pauses and extensions.
You could also arbitrarily label numbers stored in memory.
My last cellphone was a Samsung and I detested the thing.-- bristolz, Jan 30 2006 random, halfbakery