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It’s time again we dust off a few BlackBerry themes and give them a review. I joked to a colleague yesterday that it was time to say the same thing about a different batch of themes, but the more of these features I write the more I realize just how many unique themes are out there. Plus, I try to pick the themes blind — in other words, I won’t go test a theme and then decide if I want to review it. The good and the bad should be on display, so I pick three and that’s that. If it’s bad, you’ll know it from the review. This week we go back to a pair of theme developers from last week, Jason Calhoun and Cherri Chiodo, plus one from BlackBerry Theme Central, which I don’t believe we’ve yet included in TRW.

Sidewinder

The second I saw the home screen on Jason Calhoun’s Sidewinder theme, I knew I would dig it. You can notice right off the bat the way it differentiates itself visually from other themes. Rather than having the dock run along the bottom, it forms a semicircle on the right side of the screen. This allows for seven home screen icons, far more than any other standard Curve themes. The panel containing the carrier, battery indicator, new messages, and signal strength lie on the left side, so it doesn’t make one side look too crowded and the other too empty. The only change I can possibly suggest is to slide the clock over to the left hand side as well.

Once you hit the Applications Menu, everything is pretty standard. Some of the icons are unique — including a personal favorite in the Manage Connections one (a satellite). Everything is pretty easy to discern if you’re familiar with the standard BlackBerry icons. Plus, as always, you can read which icon it is at the bottom of the screen. The font is standard, and the dialog box is actually neat looking, with a green question mark icon next to the prompt. Not that any of this helps the theme function better. It functions just fine, but Calhoun certainly added some grace notes to the design.

If you’re a fan of Zen themes but want something different than a bottom dock, I’d recommend checking this out. It’s a pretty cheap option, too. You can get the Sidewinder theme at the BBGeeks store for just $5. Not bad for a basic, aesthetically pleasing theme.

Super Mario Pipes Animated

I haven’t knowingly reviewed anything from BlackBerry Theme Central, but after seeing the Super Mario Pipes Animated theme, I had to give them a shot. As with every 20-something male, I was obsessed with Super Mario Bros. growing up, always racing my friends to see who could beat the latest game first (I destroyed my friends in the race through Mario Bros. 3 — it was embarrassing for them, I’m sure). However, I should have taken their spelling of Super Mario — Supermario — as the first indicator of an annoying theme.

Okay, so the home screen looks neat. It’s an animated image of one-up mushrooms and pipes, but at first i thought that there were no actual functions on it. After all, there are no icons. Silly me. After scrolling furiously, just to be sure, I saw that sometimes, if I scrolled correctly, a character would pop out of one of the warp pipes. Keyboard Lock, Messages, Phone, Calendar, and Address Book are the defaults, and I didn’t see an easy way to change that. They’re basically hidden, though, making them of little use to me.

The Applications Menu is just a mess. Yes, it’s nice that many of the icons have the application name below them for easy recognition. However, it’s an absolute necessity, since the icons have nothing to do with the application and everything to do with icons from the video game series. Because the icons aren’t blocked they can blend into the background, making them difficult to discern. And as an added bonus, some of the icons just don’t show up. You have to scroll to them to get the icon to pop up. Again, I celebrate the spirit, but the execution is just obnoxious.

If you like having power-up mushrooms as your battery indicator and fire flowers as your signal strength, this theme might be for you. I’m staying away, though. As I’ve always said, I’m a function over form guy, and this theme is all form and no function. You can get the Super Mario Pipes Animated theme at the BBGeeks Store for $5. It’s for OS 4.5 and up only.

No Smoking TodayPlus

I love me a good TodayPlus theme, and no one delivers interesting themes like Cherri Chiodo. So we’ve got a good match today, right? Well, after the Super Mario theme, I damn well hope so. Thankfully, Cherri delivers once again. The No Smoking theme is a rather basic one, featuring messages and calendar on the home screen right above a row of five icons. Pretty standard stuff, but it’s nice to see it put together so well. The gray, smokey background gives the theme an eye-pleasing design.

As is Cherri’s trademark, the icons are not what you’d get from a standard theme. She blocks them off so that there’s no chance they blend in with the background. It’s easy to do when you have a dark-ish image. Man icons feature black in them, and if there’s black in the background there’s a chance for confucion. Thankfully, by making definitive blocks Cherri avoids this issue completely. The icons are easy to recognize, which makes the theme all that much better. As I always recommend, at least from a personal level, with Cherri’s themes is that you change the font if you find the comic font a bit much.

Cherri’s theme runs a bit more expensive than the others, hitting the $6.99 price point. You can get the No Smoking theme at the BBGeeks Store, of course. This link is for the Curve version, but if you type “No Smoking” into the search bar, the other versions, including the Bold, will come up.

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