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Take Advantage of 3D Touch: How to Set Favorite Contacts on Your iPhone

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One of the coolest new features in the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus is Apple’s innovative 3D Touch technology. 3D Touch is Apple’s name for the Force Touch tech found in the Apple Watch and MacBook trackpads. It uses a network of 96 discrete sensors placed between the cover glass and the display backlight that can sense the amount of pressure a user places on the iPhone.

Tap the iPhone, and it works just like it always did.  Lightly do a long press, and you can enter wiggle mode. Press hard, however, and you activate 3D Touch – which lets you zip through iOS 9 with a number of shortcuts; pressing firmly on different Apple apps results in different things.

3d Touch iPhone 6sOne of the best features, however, is its integration with the dialer.  If you happen to “Peek” by pressing into the phone icon, you’ll get a pop up menu that allows you to instantly dial your favorite contacts, or add new contacts to your phone’s address book. In the past, I’ve never seen a reason to really set favorite contacts up on iOS, but this changes everything.

In order to take advantage of the shortcut, you’ll need to set up a few of your favorite contacts.


Step 1. Select the dialer on your iPhone’s screen.

Setting your favorite contacts on the iPhone.Step 2. Hit the Favorites button, found on the lower left.

Setting your favorite contacts on the iPhone.As you can see, I’m a horrible person that has zero favorite people on my iPhone.  Let’s fix that!

Step 3. Hit the + sign in the upper right corner, and select a contact.
Setting your favorite contacts on the iPhone.I know! Apple, Inc. will be my friend, right? Let’s add them to our Favorites.

Step 4. Choose which number to set as a Favorite contact.

Setting your favorite contacts on the iPhone.Here, you can see there’s only a single number for Apple to be found in my contacts list. If you have multiple numbers for a single entry, you’ll need to choose a specific one to add as Favorite contact.  Don’t worry, you can go back and add a second number for the same contact if you want to have both options pop up.

Setting your favorite contacts on the iPhone.And that’s pretty much it. If you check your Favorites list, you should see the contact listed, along with the chosen number (in this case, I picked Apple’s “main” number, as you can see on the right).

Be careful – if you tap on a contact here, it’ll immediately start dialing! If you need to change or delete Favorites from your contacts, just tap on the edit button in the upper left and choose which contact to remove. Removing them here will only affect Favorites; it won’t delete them from your main phonebook.

Now, on the main screen, tap hard enough to activate 3D Touch and Peek at your dialer icon. You should see a menu pop up that lists your new Favorite contacts. If you were to make two calls every day and save three seconds each time, this one trick could save you over half an hour every year! Stay tuned for similar tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your new iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Mark Warner

    09/29/2015 at 7:33 pm

    Totally useless. I have only 3 of my favorite contacts in my 3-d touch window. How do I change these? Your post delivers no help as your title would imply.

  2. TJ

    02/26/2016 at 10:52 am

    The three names that do come up are random and change and it is not based upon who I call most often. Frustrating but one of my most called is on the list. It would be nice if was our most called within favorites. Oh well. Thanks

  3. brett robinson

    04/01/2016 at 9:34 am

    Hi I have one of these phone which like . I have 5 favourites at the moment. But I don’t seem to 2 get new ones that are in favourites to work on the 3D although they ARE in favourites. In other words 2 favourites will not show when I use the 3D? One is my mothers telephone number. So hers is in favourites but does not show when using 3D?

  4. brett robinson

    04/04/2016 at 2:11 am

    Thanks, not a very good set up really I think.

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