How to make your own cell phone theme

Posted on July 28, 2008 at 5:39 am

Do you want to make your own phone wallpapers and icons? Do you want your phone “skinned” with your favorite color palette?

One of the most popular phone model today is the Series 60. To make a Series 60 theme just download this free tool from Softonic.com:

http://series-60-theme-studio.en.softonic.com/symbian

Warning: this software is based from the Eclipse platform and uses Java as the main engine. It could take about 250+MB of RAM when you run it so make sure your PC can handle this. 1G of RAM should be good enough, 512MB of RAM could be pushing it.

After downloading the 136MB installer file, install it on your computer. After that click the “Carbide.ui S60 Theme Edition” from your program files. At first use it will ask for the directory where you want to save your work:

You may put any directory for the workspace. After that it will open the Carbide welcome screen where you can choose tasks like “Create Theme” or open an existing theme:

Choose “Create Theme”, it will open a dialog window that will ask for the name of the theme:

After clicking “Finish” the theme editor will appear:

To start editing background pictures, you will need to set the bitmap editor on the Preferences panel :

Note that the Bitmap Editor could be any photo editing software. If you have Adobe Photoshop then you can put it on the path of the Bitmap editor instead of mspaint. You can always change this to any exe file you want.

To start editing the background picture click Background > Idle Background > Convert and Edit in Bitmap Editor:

It will ask for the size of the picture/bitmap file:

Change the dimensions of the picture as needed. This is set to default (240X320) for Nokia Series 60 phones. Click OK to continue editing the bitmap/picture file.

MSPaint (or any bitmap editor you set) should open and let you edit as an ordinary picture file:

From this point, it is all photo editing creativity and making the background picture that you want to appear on your phone. Save the file to have it updated on the theme editor.

The beauty of the theme editor is that every item on the theme is editable using the same method. For example, editing the contacts icon is done by clicking the contacts icon and exporting the icon to a bitmap editor:

To edit each individual interface (i.e. Applications menu, Idle menu) use the Gallery Tab and click on the menu you want to edit:

On the above example, I clicked the Applications Grid 1 to edit the Applications menu of type 1. (Note: There is a type 2 Applications menu on Nokia Series 60 )

After editing the colors and background pictures, export the file so you can install it on your phone:

It will ask for the location where you want your theme file be saved:

To put the theme file on your phone just send the theme to your phone via Bluetooth. Open the file in your phone’s inbox and just install it like an ordinary application. If you don’t have Bluetooth, you can put the file in your memory card using a memory card reader.

Sony Eriksson users should not worry because there are tools to make your own themes:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Mobile-Phone-Tools/Sony-Ericsson/Sony-Ericsson-Themes-Creator.shtml

If you want to dig more on Nokia Themes and Series 60, make sure to checkout the Nokia Forums website:

http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/getting_started/

I hope you enjoy this little tutorial. You could do more like adding sounds to events – much like how Windows works when you click a button. These tools will let you Jazz up your mobile devices the way you them!

Ben Carigtan writes about computers and tech topics so you could get the best out of them.

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Comments

One Response to “How to make your own cell phone theme”

Bridget said on : September 9th, 2009 at 12:20 pm

does this program work for blackberry curve? so far this is the only “make your own theme” site i’ve seen.