Mobile terminals such as mobile phones have entered an intelligent era, During use of a mobile phone, a short message function thereof is used frequently, and when editing a short message, it is sometimes required to input content of a contact list saved locally in the mobile phone, such as a name, a phone number, and an E-mail address of a recipient. Initially, a method for inputting such content of a contact list is to manually write down contact information in the contact list on a piece of paper, and then input the information on a short message editing interface. Apparently, such a method is too complicated, and is not very accurate or efficient.
To solve this problem, a method for calling content of a contact list is proposed, wherein information on a category of a contact list is taken as an entry in vocabulary of an IME (Input Method Editor) system of a mobile phone. For example, names of all recipients in the contacts are added to the vocabulary; and then content of a contact list corresponding to the name of a selected recipient is called from the IME system. Wherein the method for calling the content of the contact list corresponding to the name of the selected recipient from the IME system is that: a sequence of characters corresponding to the “name of the recipient” is input on an IME interface to obtain a list of candidate entries including the “name of the recipient”; the entry “name of the recipient” is selected, such that the mobile phone acquires names of all recipients saved in the vocabulary, and then a user selects a name of a recipient as needed and acquiring the content of the contact list corresponding to the name of the recipient selected; finally, the user performs a subsequent operation using the content of the contact list according to an actual operation to be performed.
Although efficiency in input by the user may be increased with the above method for calling content of a contact list, key information corresponding to the contact list must be added in the vocabulary in advance before the content of the required contact list can be found by inputting the key information, therefore it is still not fast enough; moreover, in the above method, there are limitations, such as a limitation on the length of the content of the information saved in the vocabulary and a limitation that the content has to be of regular English words; for example, information such as a mailing address or an email address may not be added into the vocabulary since it is relatively long or not of regular English words; in addition, many mobile phones do not support the function of generating a vocabulary entry using content of a contact list as key information, leading to limitation of this method when being applied to a device.
Apparently, with an existing method for calling content of a contact list, content of a contact list can not be called promptly without being limited by a category of content to be acquired or by a device.