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Joe

Theme Review Wednesdays: Simpsons, SummerSpirt, iSwirl

Posted by Joe on September 9, 2009

I hope you guys find some use out of this bi-weekly feature. Surely not everyone picks up all of these themes, but I think it’s a quality showcase of the premium BlackBerry themes out there. Yes, there are free ones, but I try to pick premium ones which stand out from the free crowd. I think we have three such themes this week, including one which I stumbled upon and absolutely love. From an aesthetic standpoint, at least.

Simpsons

Have a conversation with me and I guarantee that at some point or other I will quote the Simpsons in a manner at least tangentially related to the conversation. Like many in my generation, I hold The Simpsons above any other TV show of the era, at least Seasons 1 through 9. Even now they have a good episode from time to time. So it’s with much pleasure that I present a sharp-looking Simpsons theme for you OS 4.6 and higher folks.

Very simply, the theme replaces the typical BlackBerry icons with Simpsons head shots. That might get confusing for some, though there’s always the text on the bottom of the screen to let you know what app you’re selecting. Plus, there’s a small icon in the bottom right of each head shot to help better explain its function. There’s everyone from Moe Sizlack to Martin Prince. Unfortunately, I did not see Ralph Wiggum in there. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to set my ringtone to “I bent my Wookie.”

You can get The Simpsons theme over at MobiMadness for free. Yeah, I usually highlight premium themes, but this one is as sharp as a premium theme, and I couldn’t resist. You can get it for the Bold, Tour, and 8900.

SummerSpirit

When Hedone Design comes out with a new theme, you know it. I got roughly four emails, some forwarded to me, about this on, and like the Hedone themes which have preceded it, this one is a winner. It comes a little late, as we’re watching summer fade away, but it’s still some nice eye candy in the winter months, when we long for flip flops and the beach.

Unlike the past few Hedone themes we’ve reviewed, there are no fancy gadgets in this one. The six icons you see on the Home Screen are all you get — no pop-outs for additional home screen icons. In fact, there’s not even a Today preview. It’s based around the serene environment of the beach in summertime. The signal meter is represented by floating butterflies, the battery meter is a flower, and the profile icon a butterfly. It’s cute, for sure, and there are three more wallpapers included in the expansion pack.

You can get the SummerSpirit theme for $6.99. That covers all OS versions 4.5 and up.

iSwirl

Our final theme this week goes from aesthetic to function. The iSwirl theme is one of the many available at Themes4bb, and it has a few features that I really like in a theme. For starters there’s a Today preview, which is always a plus. But what I really like is how the theme takes care of Home Screen real estate. It features some hidden icons, and the ones that are visible aren’t cumbersome at all.

Instead of having a picture icon for the main Home Screen applications, iSwirl features simple text buttons. This covers a static dock, consisting of phone, email, SMS, browser, address book, calendar, and media applications, plus a button to hit the Applications Menu (as if you couldn’t just hit the Menu button). To top it off, there are four hidden icons, two on either side of the screen (that’s six total, three on each side for the Storm). You can pick whichever icons you want to appear from the sides.

You can get the iSwirl theme for $6.99 at Themes4bb. That covers the 4.6+ models: Tour, 8900, Bold, Storm. And yes, we know that they spelled browser wrong in the interface.

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