Like most other carriers, Verizon has crippled its phones (in this case the Motorola v710) to better suit its services and partener deals (incidentally, I finally got my $25 credit from the class action settlement involving the v710's crippled Bluetooth). Most annoyingly, it does not provide a way to change the homepage. The default homepage is some joint venture with MSN that contains lots of images, loads slowly, and is generally useless. It has a bookmarks sub-page, but it's annoying to get to and use (e.g. none of the bookmarks have access keys).

Thankfully, it looks like there is a hidden way to change the homepage. This page incidentally mentioned this while talking about how to use your own proxy with the phone. Specifically, the steps are:

• Go to the menu (upper middle button)
• Quickly type 073887*
• Use 000000 (that's 6 zeros) as the security code
• Select "Web Sessions"
• Select the "VZW" entry (it should be locked)
• From the menu, select "Copy Entry" and name your copy (the name does not matter)
• Edit your copy and change the homepage field as you see fit
• Select the entry and pick "Set Default" from its menu

I initially considered something like the mobile Google Personalized Homepage, but I decided that was too heavyweight. Instead I created my own mini start-page has that is less than 1K in size.