Replicate "Favorite" contacts in webOS 1.x 6

While the ability to tag "Favorite" contacts in webOS 2.0 helps to quickly call/email/sms/search for your most important contacts, this does not help the majority of users who are still on webOS 1.4.5. However, there is a rather clever method that you can use to replicate the benefits of the "Favorites" functionality for those not on webOS 2.0 devices. The premise is that if you sort your contacts based on Company, instead of by Name, then you can add a company of "AAAAAA" to any contacts that you want listed at the top of any contact list/search results. You can even increment the company name to "AAAAAB", "AAAAAC", etc to sort it how you would like. However, there are a few steps that you need to do before this will work, so keep reading after the break to find out how to set this up

In the Contacts App, swipe down from the top-left and select "Preferences & Accounts". Under "LIST ORDER" at the top, select "Company & last name" or "Company & first name" (depending on your preference). You may need to close and reopen your Contacts apps for this to take affect

To add the company name to a contact:

1. Search for that contact, open up the record and then click the "Edit" button.
2. If necessary, tap on the "account icon" in the top-right hand corner of the screen (to the right of the contact's name) to select the account* you want to assign this Company Name to
3. On the third line of the contact record, add in "AAAAAA" as the "company name" for that record and then tap the "Done" button on the bottom-left corner
4. Unfortunately, the sorting of the records will be based off of the "primary profile" attached to that contact. So, if the contact record that you added the company to is not the "primary profile" for that contact, the company name will not show up. To set the primary profile, tap on the top row of the record (that has the name and profile picture) to list all the linked contact records, tap on the record with the company name you want and select "Set As Primary Profile"

At this point, your Contact app will now sort all of your contacts based on Company and Name, although searching for these records remains the same as before. And, as you can see in this screenshot of the email app, performing a search for a contact will always put any of your "Favorites" at the top of the search.  Without even pressing any keys on the keyboard, you can also tap the  icon to bring up a list of all your contacts with any of these newly tagged "Favorites" showing up at the top of the list.

* Note that only contact accounts that allow "edit" access, such as the Palm Profile or Google, will allow you to add a company name. If you want to add a new company name to a contact that does not belong to an editable account, you can create a blank contact record for that person, follow the directions above to assign a company, and then just link those records together

Thanks for Mike Plaut for submitting this tip