I've seen a few threads about this, and remain a little puzzled as to why people still need the Speed Dial function. Speed Dial was pretty much a holdover from the quaint ol' days of featurephones that relied on the physical keypad for shortcuts. I just add my most commonly called contacts to one of my homescreens as individual Direct Dial widgets. You can fit up to 16 contacts on a homescreen, which is more than what you could do with just long-pressing a phone keypad digit.