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I love me a good BlackBerry tip, and yesterday Kevin at CrackBerry had one I have yet to explore: adding an extension to your BlackBerry contacts. Since a lot of my contacts — and yours, probably — comprise work numbers, it makes sense to have some kind of apparatus in place to handle extensions. It appears there are a few ways of handling this on your BlackBerry, and Kevin goes over them in some detail over at CB. For our purposes, we’ll go over the basics. You can get the whole shebang over there if you’re interested in the additional detail.

There are essentially two ways to go about extension dialing, though there’s a shortcut to one or the other, depending on your BlackBerry. These are the Add Pause and Add Wait options, which can be found in your edit contact screen. After entering the phone number, click the Menu key and you’ll see both of them.

Add Pause is a hassle-free option. It waits a few seconds after you dial, and then automatically dials the extension you noted in your address book. This is also handy for voice systems which always prompt you to press 1 for English right off the bat. You can click Add Pause, and then use 1 as the extension. That will automatically select that for you upon dialing.

There are pitfalls to this, as Kevin notes. For instance, it automatically enters in the extension after a few seconds, so if there’s more than a few second wait, Add Pause might not work at all. There is another option, though.

Add Wait sets a prompt for you to dial the extension. This is handy when the wait between dialing the number and your prompt to enter it is more than a few seconds. Once you’re into your call, you’ll have a prompt to either dial the extension, skip the process, or end the call. That makes things pretty simple. It also works well if you have to enter in another number before dialing the extension.

What Kevin adds to this is that you can just hit X (which is alt-X when entering in phone numbers) to automatically add a pause or wait. Which is it? It’s going to depend on your Berry. Kevin says that on his 8900 it’s a pause, but on his Tour it’s a wait. So you’ll have to check with your own BlackBerry to see which one works best. But for easy of entering in a number with an extension, an X will usually suffice.

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