a. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a mobile communication device capable of a wireless communication, such as a so-called mobile telephone (or cellular phone), a personal handy phone system (PHS), etc., and particularly to such devices having a flat display of a relatively large size.
b. Related Art
In recent years, mobile communication devices such as a mobile telephone and a PHS are widely spread while the number of users of mobile PCs and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are rapidly increasing. In this connection, it becomes possible to perform a data communication outdoors or at an outside site with any desired person by connecting the mobile PC with the mobile communication device.
A product has recently been commercialized in which the two devices are integrated, i.e., a mobile communication device in the form of a PHS telephone with a PDA capability. This product could also be considered as a mobile information device in which a PDA is provided with a PHS capability.
This type of mobile communication devices are available for a person at a place other than his or her home or office not only for simply as a telephone but also for transmit ting/receiving e-mails and facsimiles, or accessing Internet WWW (world Wide Web) servers to browse home-pages.
For this end, such mobile communication devices include a display of a larger screen size than that of conventional mobile telephones.
In making a phone call, the dialing can be performed not only by pressing numeral keys, but also based on the phone number of a person selected from a telephone directory data, which is stored in the device, without the key entering of the phone number.
On the other hand, information of home-pages obtained from the WWW servers is written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). A document written in HTML, itself, is a text file in which codes sandwiched by symbols "&lt;" and "&gt;", called tags, are used to specify character-attribute information or layout information. A program called a "browser" interprets the tags so as to display the HTML document.
An HTML document can have other text, image or audio inserted therein, and also have parts thereof linked with images or other HTML documents. That is, in HTML documents, a location (i.e., an anchor point or hot-spot explained below) in a document can be linked (or correlated) with another location or a separate file, etc. This enables an immediate movement from a location to another location of a linked destination, allowing the effective browsing of a variety of documents (including so-called multi-media). In addition, it is possible, based on a selection of an anchor point, to open a window for sending an electronic mail (e-mail) or to activate a particular function that is associated with the anchor point.
Thus, anchor points set in an HTML document with respect to various items therein allow a user to select them so as to view other documents or activate various functions which are associated with the selected anchor points.
Incidentally, most of the portable information devices such as a PDA are provided with pens, which are used as a pointing device to directly enter commands through a touch panel on a display of the device.
However, when using the mobile communication device simply as a telephone, it is bothersome to use the pen each time a user specifies one of the phone numbers in a telephone directory. Usually, therefore, motion keys are used for selectively indicating two directions to search a phone number. For example, phone numbers with anchor points set in a telephone directory written in HTML can sequentially be designated by the use of the motion keys or the like. The browser can recognize the position of the anchor points so that for selecting one anchor point based on the motion key operation, the anchor points are sequentially designated one by one simply by indicating a forward direction or a backward direction with the keys. Such designation of an anchor point is referred to as a "focus" in the specification. Also, the position of an anchor point that is currently focussed in a displayed HTML document is referred to as a "focussed" position. An operation to cause an execution of a particular function or a jump associated with such focussed anchor point is referred to as a "selection. The "selection" is distinguished from the "designation" which is a step taken prior to the selection.
In the above-mentioned mobile communication device with a PDA capability, it is preferable to include in the telephone directory not only names and telephone numbers but facsimile numbers or e-mail addresses, etc. Further, with the telephone directory being an HTML document, the additional items can be provided with various functions as described above.
However, in such a case where anchor points are set to various items in the HTML document, the designation of an anchor point by the use of the motion keys mentioned above suffers from a problem in which it is difficult to quickly find a desired telephone number because a lot of undesired anchor points could be encountered until an anchor point of the desired number is reached.
The present invention was made in view of the foregoing problem, and it is an object of the invention to enhance the operability of a mobile communication device with a flat display of a relatively large screen size, capable of displaying thereon an HTML document.
It is another object of the invention to provide a mobile communication device with a rotary push switch, in which a desired anchor point for automatic dialing is quickly reached in response to an operation for moving a focus.