A method and apparatus are provided for presenting content to a caller and/or a called party in association with a telephone call. Content may be presented pre-ring (before the called party's telephone rings), in-call, and/or post-call. Content presented to a party may be related to another party participating in the call or may be related to a third party. Presented content may be actuable, and allow a caller to change the destination of a call, take advantage of an offer presented to him, redeem a coupon, schedule or queue a subsequent call, etc. To find a desired destination party, a caller may initiate a manual or automatic search of his local contacts (on his telephone) and/or a central or global directory or contact list. A party to a call may be offered one or more payment mechanisms for completing a purchase in an on-line or real-world transaction.

Placing a call on hold provides advantages to the party initiating the hold. The party may engage in another call or perform another action and return to the call when convenient, provided the party placed on hold is still on the call. The party on hold monitors the inactive call and waits until the call is reactivated. The party on hold is provided with a means to alert the other party via a session initiation protocol (SIP) message formatted as a ring-ping message. The message is sent to the party who placed the call on hold and the user's device activates an indicator, such as to alert the holding party that the held party wishes to re-engage the call. If the holding party does not un-hold the call or otherwise acknowledge the ring-ping indicator, another action can be initiated, such as by inviting another party to join the call.

A method performed by a first electronic device, the method includes, while engaged in a call with a second electronic device, initiating a joint media playback session in which the first and second electronic devices independently stream media content for synchronous playback; driving a speaker with a mix of a downlink signal of the call and an audio signal of the media content at an overall volume level; receiving a user-adjustment at a single volume control for the first electronic device to reduce the overall volume level; in response to the user adjustment, applying a first gain adjustment to the downlink signal and a second gain adjustment to the audio signal; and driving the speaker with a mix of the downlink signal and the audio signal at the reduced volume level.