Though the phone functions and the computer functions of the Treo work pretty well together, they are arguably separate operations. True, the Treo 650 took a step towards better blending the two functions by allowing you to launch an application from the Favorites button of the phone, but you still couldn’t dial from your handheld’s desktop.

This hurdle is seamlessly overcome with the launch of Electric Pocket’s newest feature-rich PhotoDial speed-dialer application. You can now speed-dial your frequent contacts right from your smartphone’s desktop. This handy capability alone makes the PhotoDial application worth its $9.95 purchase price, but its newest version has additional features that should seal the deal.

For one thing, PhotoDial cleverly maps itself to the green phone button on the Treo 650. Press the phone button once, and PhotoDial, and all your speed-dial icons, appear. Press it again and you open your regular phone dialer. With this option enabled, you can literally dial a phone number in less than three seconds.

PhotoDial also creates its own “PhotoDial” category in the native Treo 650 launcher. This allows you to merely tap a desktop icon to instantly dial a phone number, check your voicemail, or see your minute usage. These icons, which Electric Pocket calls “buttons,” can be one of the many provided by PhotoDial, or a photo icon of the contact you wish to dial. With its “Take a Photo” option, you can snap a picture of your friend as you add him to your speed-dial list. If you already have a photo associated with a contact, it is automatically imported into PhotoDial when you add that contact to your speed-dial set. You can use internal photos or those stored on your card as PhotoDial buttons. Adding contacts is simple with the option of importing them from your existing contact list or entering the information on the fly.

Describing what it does may not be as useful as describing what you can do with it. For example, because you have Treo 650 desktop icons of your speed dial contacts in your launcher, the computer half of your smartphone sees it as an application. This means you can map that contact to any of the hard buttons, including the configurable side button. You can call home, for example, by just pressing the side button or the office by pressing the calendar hard button. Now, that’s speed dialing! These contacts can be beamed to others or deleted using the native Palm delete or PhotoDial’s built in delete command.

You can change the skins on PhotoDial and select one of the half-dozen pleasant skins available for download for this new version with a promise of more to come. Its interface also shows your battery level and phone status.

Another interesting feature is the built-in Google search function. You can initiate a search in a matter of seconds. Launch PhotoDial with your phone button, then just press your Treo 650’s Find button (no shift needed), and a web search box opens. Enter the search term and it launches your Blazer browser to Google’s handheld search page. It’s pretty quick and works seamlessly.

PhotoDial is Electric Pocket’s successor to its popular TapDial application. PhotoDial is designed for hi-res screens like the Treo 650, and TapDial is still available for the low-res Treo 600 and others. If you bought TapDial, and have since moved to the Treo 650, your TapDial registration code will unlock PhotoDial.

Third party applications may help or hinder PhotoDial’s built-in functionality. Third party launchers may not create the dedicated PhotoDial category. SilverScreen, for example, deposits the created speed-dial icons in its “unfiled�? category, as though you installed a new application. I move these to a PhotoDial category that I created Even though I have the option of not creating a desktop icon in PhotoDial, I usually do anyway. It might come in handy, I think. I do it mostly for storage, as I find that I phone-button launch the PhotoDial application to use the speed-dial icons, and seldom initiate a call from the desktop.

Button mapping applications, like TealLaunch, increases PhotoDial’s usefulness. Button mappers often let you launch more than one application – and hence can dial more than one contact – from a single button (press, press and hold, press twice, etc.). A button mapper can allow you to assign your most important contacts to just one or two hard buttons.

I don’t have a third-party browser, like Xino or Opera Mini, but I suspect PhotoDial will launch Blazer anyway when initiating its Google search function, regardless of what other browsers you have.

I am very impressed with the functionality of this latest version of PhotoDial. The lion’s share of the phone calls I make are to just a few numbers, and PhotoDial makes calling them faster and easier than using even the Favorites screen. I like that it launches from the phone button, that it’s skinable, and can start a Google search in seconds. It is the type of application that makes the Treo 650 shine brightly and underscore its superiority over even the most sophisticated of ordinary cellphones. It makes the Treo more functional and its price is right in my range to make it attractive.

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