Patent ID: 7962136

Claim:
A wirelessly enabled handheld electronic device, comprising: an input apparatus; a communications subsystem; a display; a processor; and a memory storing one or more applications executable by said processor, said one or more applications being adapted to: display on said display a listing of one or more known networks, each of said known networks having network information stored in said memory; scan for one or more available networks using said communications subsystem, each of said available networks being available for use in conducting wireless communications in an area in which said handheld electronic device is currently located, and display on said display a listing of said available networks; enable the manual entry of one or more manually entered networks and the manual entry of information relating to the one or more manually entered networks using said input apparatus; enable the addition of one or more preferred networks to a preferred network list using said input apparatus, said preferred networks being one or more of: (i) certain of said known networks selected from said listing of known networks, (ii) certain of said available networks selected from said listing of available networks, and (iii) the manually entered networks; enable the assignment of a priority value to each of said preferred networks using said input apparatus; and utilize one or more of said preferred networks for performing wireless communications using said communications subsystem when said handheld electronic device is in a roaming situation, said one or more of said preferred networks being utilized in a priority order that is based on the priority value assigned to each of said preferred networks.