Using a calling card got a little more easier, thanks to iPhone

As many of you may know, calling cards are typically used to call overseas at cheaper rates than what ISD calls would offer. I use these cards frequently to call my friends and family in India.

For all the impatient folk that are tired of listening through the lengthy messages and pressing a lot of keys on the cell phone while using these calling cards to call someone, here is a tidbit.

iPhone gives you an option to store the phone number of a contact along with the toll free number of the calling card provider .This means you don’t have to press the recipient’s number every time you call him/her. You create a contact and assign it the recipient’s number along with the toll free number. Once you store this composite number you can directly call this number in the iPhone-esque way of feather-touching it and iPhone takes care of pressing the keys for you.

Let me use an example to drive my point home.

For example if the toll-free number of the calling card is 1-866-123-1234 and the number you wanna call is 8611234567, you can create a contact and assign the contact, the following number : “18661231234,918611234567″ ; 91 is the international code of the country, in this case it is India . I am assuming that you have your phone registered with the calling card provider so that you do not have to press the access code; only few calling cards provide this option. If not, the sequence, “18661231234,123123,918611234567″ would do; 123123 is the assumed access code. Now, all you have to do is to dial this stored contact in the iPhone-esque way of feather-touching it.

The question on your mind at this point might be about the location of the “,” character on your iPhone keypad. You can find a key that has the characters “+*#”. Press that key and you will notice the change of the keypad style. The new-style keypad has a “pause” key. Pressing this “pause” key would introduce ‘,’ character. The ‘,’ character results in a unit delay between the preceding and the succeeding number. If you had decided to introduce two units of delay you would type in two commas; your number now looks like 18661231234,,918611234567.

As few of you might have already noticed , this method of storing numbers can also be used to store telephone numbers with extensions , and thereby avoid the repeated labor of manually typing the extension numbers .