Patent ID: 8103970

Claim:
A cellularly communicative electronic device, comprising: electronic circuitry that allows the cellularly communicative electronic device to operate over a cellular network; a display; a keypad, including a plurality of alpha or numeric keys and a dynamically assignable function key, wherein the dynamically assignable function key is not one of the alpha or numeric keys of the keypad; and a processor and an interface manager executing in the processor which configure the cellularly communicative electronic device to implement: (1) a first process thread, involving displaying a first screen on the display, the first screen concurrently comprising: (a) a first level menu providing a plurality of functional groupings for user selection, on a first area of the displayed first screen, wherein: each of the functional groupings represents a different group of cellular device functions offered by the cellularly communicative electronic device, and the cellular device functional groupings displayed in the first level menu include call messaging, contacts list, obtaining device services, recent calls, and settings and tools; and (b) on a second area of the displayed first screen, a second level menu of choices for user selection from within a selected one of the functional groupings of the first level menu; (2) a second process thread, responsive to a cursor control input from a user, involving moving a cursor on the display across at least the second level menu to indicate a selection of one of the choices on the displayed second level menu; and (3) a third process thread, responsive to a user acceptance of the selected one of the choices, involving displaying a second screen on the display, the second screen concurrently comprising: (a) an area containing information relating to the selected choice; and (b) a key assignment area displaying a function of the cellularly communicative device associated with the selected choice, dynamically assigned to the function key of the cellularly communicative device, wherein: the processor is programmed to cause the cellularly communicative device to perform the dynamically assigned function associated with the selected choice, upon user activation of the function key during the display of the second screen; the displayed second level menu presents choices arranged in a prescribed order; and the prescribed order is a function of frequency of previous user selections of one or more of the choices.