Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for pocketnow.com and you know theming or skinning your Android powered phone hasn't really been that easy outside maybe changing your wallpaper now that's something that a lot of OMS have tried to accomplish by pushing out customizations to the Android operating system which in turn has really delayed their updates to newer versions of the Android OS recently Google came out with Android Gingerbread version 2.3 and with that they promised to make that theming and skinning process a lot easier let's see exactly what they meant all we have to do is look at an app called theme chooser originally by t-mobile but released into the open source so let's go look at a couple of themes and generally how theme chooser works okay so what I've got here is a t-mobile g2 now this is running CyanogenMod seven nightly eight now that's important you need to have something that's the release candidate of CM 7 or above to be able to get this little guy and that's the theme chooser app that I was talking about it's not available in the market it comes with the CyanogenMod roms and it's actually something that was developed by t-mobile and released into the open source now what this lets you do is change a whole bunch of stuff you can see my icons down here have kind of a orange appeal to them if you will an orange theme and my power menu has orange buttons my battery and my network status indicators of course are orange as well if we come over in to settings we'll come in and look at display really quick you can see my check mark is orange when I tap on brightness my brightness horizontal divider line here is orange and I've got a nice orange glow you notice I don't have theming on my status bars just yet that is actually a drawback to not to that app itself but it's just something they haven't been able to tie into yet the theme is actually built so that this that's opened up it'll go ahead and theme those as well but really kind of cool stuff that you can do with it now let me show you how this works really quick first and foremost I have a separate app in here for a wallpaper chooser so if we long press on the desktop go into wallpapers you'll see I have a new wallpaper entry called orange octane wallpapers go ahead and select that and here are all of the wallpapers that this theme developer has put together specific for this theme but of course one theme isn't all that impressive so let's go ahead and take a look first and foremost is Android and this is one of my favorite themes it's green based but up here in the bars including the bars in your in Gmail and your menu bars and whatnot you have this cool little background image on the bar it's not just a flat color so that's really kind of neat skipping over blue Bionic we have a cyan bread which I showed you in a previous video skipping over these two we have the system and that's just what comes default now these themes you can either install with an apk or you can download and install from the market and I've installed these from the market so let's go ahead and take a look at red remix because we've just looked at orange so we'll look at red we tap apply it applies the settings and there we have it now of course we need to go in and change our wallpaper and we're going to change this to one of these let's choose on this one right here and sometimes the wallpaper doesn't take the first time so if you come back in and try it again you should then have it kind of a little inconvenience and I really didn't see that until I started shooting the video for you but some things here you'll need to reboot your phone to be able to make apply for example you'll see my market icon is still the orange theme if I reboot that's going to be back and it's going to be a red theme another thing is if you notice when I tap and hold on my icons I've got a green glow around them now that's a setting that I can do in the CyanogenMod settings right over here CyanogenMod settings I can come in here and change the color of my highlight to be whatever I want and this theme developer has gone the extra mile and provided hexadecimal codes to set that glow so you can make the glow match as well so let me go ahead and show you one more and that is the blue Bionic go ahead and set that and then we'll set the wallpaper to match wallpapers you'll notice down here that I don't want to have the red or orange I only have blue Bionic wallpapers so that menu matches the theme and again I ran into my didn't apply the first time bug so we'll go ahead and set that and it looks great now one thing that I do want to mention is I'm running a launcher pearl premium and that lets me set the wallpaper assuming that the doc background image down here and I just have that set as grass which i think is kind of neat but you can also grab a whole bunch of background image packs and I have an article on that over at pocketnow.com as well to change that and you can make it match your theme as you will so really kind of cool this started out as a t-mobile venture was released into the open source and then of course picked up by some of my favorite developers out there it's really kind of cool all of the themes that you've seen here including the theme chooser and the wallpaper picker are free they're available in the market the and of course will have links to those over at pocketnow.com so head on over to the website to to download those the themes I do want to mention that they come free but there is a donate version as well if you think that these themes are great and you want to support the developer to hopefully make some more of these really cool themes and really cool wallpapers go ahead and download and install the donate version they're only a couple bucks and that's just a signal to him that says hey I like the way that these look and I want you to make more it's a really good way to give back to that developer all kinds of cool stuff so this is what Google was talking about when they said gingerbread would be able to have theming capabilities built in and really move away from having to have custom launchers to change the look and feel of the Android experience itself I think they've done a really good job and I'm eager to see what else that can be done with this and I'm sure we'll see that progress in the near future if you'd like to see what can be done in the future of course the future isn't here yet so you need to make sure you subscribe to our video channel so that you can stay up to date on all this cool stuff as it happens and if you'd like seeing this stuff give us a thumbs up so that we know that you want to see more of this stuff for pocket now I'm Joe Levi